Because I Wanted to.

 I've been wanting to try my hand at this phase of woodworking for some time now.

Which is of course incorporating logs of various sizes on the front of the shop as well as hand railing and all the in between parts.

In order to remove the bark from the logs I needed a way to securely hold the pieces while using a draw knife to scrape away the bark, and shape the pieces somewhat.

Thus I built a Shaving horse.

I sit at one end, I can adjust the lower clamping jaw table by moving a block shim in or out to fit the size of the work piece.

My feet rest on the clamp arm pegs below, and as I push forward, the top jaw will clamp solidly on my work piece while I shape and clean it up.

I could cover a lot more in the use of the shaving horse but the main purpose was for cleaning up the necessary parts logs,  for the porch project.

                       Now just a few photos of the shop porch.

Now there were two other tools that had to be made once the bark was removed from the smaller log pieces.

Tenons had to be cut on the ends of the logs, { tenons are the profiling of wood for insertion into another } so one tool was built to do that in conjunction with the use of the table saw. Now because some log pieces were curved or crooked if the tenons were just cut on the ends, the tenons would be pointing off in different directions, and would not insert into the mortise { mortise is a hole or recess cut into wood to receive the corresponding piece= a tenon }

So in order to to take a log with curve and make the ends point at each other, I built a line boring tool, which in conjunction with a drill, I could drill a pilot hole at each end, and the pilot holes would be pointing at each other, which the above mentioned tool would work with for the tenons.

Enough said.