How to Make a Miniature Bench

We make miniature (aka dollhouse) furniture here at Happy Bungalow and lots of folks ask us how we make it.

How do you make your miniature furniture? Oh, we’ve produced a video answering that question.

Do we use special tools? Not really, just tools designed for making full sized furniture – some of which we use in unconventional ways.

How about special wood, where can you buy such small pieces? We use wood intended for use in full-scale projects, we just take care to cut it down.

The bench is at 1” scale (aka 1:12 where 1 miniature inch equals 12 inches in real size-ness) and is made from white oak. A lot of steps are needed – for a small item made of only 4 individual pieces! Each piece touches a few different saws, sanders, and finally the hand sanding at the end.

The table-saw shows first in the video. It’s a powerful (and dangerous) machine I use to rip thin slices off the larger board. Some of those thin slices get sent through saw a second time to make them narrower. The sticks and devices I’m using keep my fingers away from the spinning blade (it will cut off a finger as easily as it cuts wood).

The miter saw (chop saw) has a custom adjustable fence I made myself. The fence can be quickly adjusted to cut off consistent specific lengths of wood.

The band-saw is only used briefly to cut out the notches in the bench legs.

You’ll notice my fingertips covered in tape when I use the sanders. The miniature-furniture pieces are so small that I my fingers are necessarily right next to the sanding belt. Just a brief slip and contact with the belt sands off a chunk of skin or fingernail – and it happens faster than you knew it did. So the few minutes spent taping up my fingers saves me from weeks of bandaging up a finger.

The hand sanding is vital to making a piece that can be handled (and played) with as the edges produced by the saws and sanders are sharp.

Gluing miniature furniture together is an exercise in patience. Once the glue is dry the benches are crazy strong, but when the glue is wet, they are most certainly not. So I have to put hold together the wet-glued pieces while I clean off the excess glue (with the wetted q-tips or a knife edge) that spills onto the wood. Then the bench is carefully moved to a spot where it can dry.

Blam, and there’s a bench!