Mini church furniture – Ambo

One of the projects that I need to get done this month is a set of mini church furniture. A friend of mine is teaching a religion class to a group of 3-5 year olds, and it requires some scaled down furniture for them.

This project is starting with four or five main pieces, but seems to be expanding. I need to focus on the first batch though, so I pulled together a few pictures from the web and sketched up some basic dimensional drawings here: mini church furniture.PDF

I have a lot of scrap oak, so that is what I am using. The first piece that I am building will be the ambo.

I cut out all of the pieces on my table and miter saws. They are pretty simple shapes, so it went very quickly.

The only challenging part was cutting a dado for the book shelf. I used my Tee-square to guide the router, stopping the dado before it cut through the front.

Construction was fairly simple, just wood glue and brad nails.

Before I clamped in the shelf, I slid a piece of 1/4″ plywood behind it and pinned it in place.

Next step was to add the top. I clamped a few blocks around the edges to but up against the sides, then I added glue to the top edges.

I dropped the top in place and the blocks held it there until I could nail it down.

I also pinned a 1/4″ strip to the bottom edge so the book won’t slide off.

That went fairly quickly, not more than two hours, start to finish. I also needed to make a board to hold blocks that will eventually bear the kids names, and other info. I had my CNC carve out a paschal lamb on the board, while I was working on the ambo. I also had it carve the grooves for the retainers, while it was at it.

When it was done, I cut and chamfered a few strips and glued them into the grooves. Then I cut a bunch of blocks from maple off-cuts and the board was complete as well.

I plan to hold off on finishing until I get a few more of the pieces done.