It's laminated from three pieces of 35mm thick beech, so it's a little off square at 100mm by 105mm, but I doubt whether anyone will notice. It wasn't all that easy doing the gluing, as the wood is nicely planed and the glue makes it slide about when the clamps are tightened up.
For the next leg I plan to put dowels to hold the pieces in place while they are being glued. I tried this with this first leg, but I didn't drill through two pieces at the same time, and the result was that the holes were a fraction off, so in the event I didn't use the dowels. If I do the next one properly (clamping two pieces of wood before drilling them), the dowels won't show: they will be fitted from the centre strip of wood outwards, not reaching all the way to the outside surface.
It does look a bit like a part from one of those little wooden puzzles that are so hard to put back together. That's pretty much what it is. On the face to the right there's a large dovetail for a long rail going from one end of the bench to the other. Not showing up very well, there's a morticed dovetail (the white glue is showing a bit) in the centre lower down: the long rail in this case is held in place by a wedge (which forms the upper part of the dovetail).
On the left hand side there will be three cross-rails which will hold this leg to the one behind it: the upper one has the bench-top resting on it too. None of them come all the way through to the front face. There's also a peg right at the top to locate the benchtop. I forgot this when I cut the wood, so it was inserted afterwards and is held in place with glue and dowels.
The slot at the bottom - quite a difficult mortice to cut - is for the bottom part of the leg vice. There will eventually be a circular hole for the vice screw about three-quarters of the way up.
It's sitting on top of my now-cleaned-up benchtop.
The other picture is of the willow tree. Drastic remedies! We've reduced it to tall stump, believing that pollarded willows will sprout away like anything in the springtime. It was looking very thin last year, and we were concerned it might drop a branch on the farmhouse. Philippe Chabut came with his chainsaw and did it very quickly, even cutting up the branches into logs for us. It'll be a year or two before we can burn it.
You can see it's a nice sunny day. Cold, though - minus six first thing this morning.
