workbench

I'm breaking all of the rules with this bench. Except the ones that are important.

I started this bench around the first of the year, and got part of the top glued up. As it got north of maybe 100 pounds, I was having trouble maneuvering it due to some sore muscles and haven't gotten back to it until now. And yes, if you are wondering, I am feeling much better now. Ask me about transdermal magnesium sometime.

Anyway, this bench is destined to be ugly. It isn't going to have the best or prettiest joinery. It has voids from splits and knots. It has screw holes. Most of it isn't going to be beautifully finished. Or really finished at all in the proper sense of the word.

In short, I'm throwing out all of the minor rules in favor of getting a bench done that adheres to the important rules.

It is already heavy. It will be flat. It will be stable. And I will be able to clamp stuff to it. That is what a workbench does. And as a bonus, it wasn't expensive.

As for long life, it may not outlast me as a working workbench like it would have if I had paid more attention to the minor rules. I figure it will be good for 25-50 years of regular use though, and there is a decent chance I will get around to building another workbench by 2050.

Note to self, find some trees to cut on your sawmill for a future workbench.

Seriously, one of the great frustrations of building a first workbench is not having a workbench to build it on. By laminating contruction grade 2x material, I determined to sidestep a lot of that frustration.

This build method allows assembling the top first so you can set it up on sawhorses, or as I did, on the legs mounted upside down to flatten it. That at least gives you a fairly decent surface to work on.

For the top, I took 2"x12"x16' "whitewood" from the orange store (Yes, it was blown away in the Joplin tornado). It might be some kind of fir. It definitely isn't yellow pine, which I would have preferred for its hardness and stiffness.

It would have been better to have jointed and planed the surfaces and even edges before putting them together. I didn't and have less than perfect glue joints that seem to be quite sturdy.

I did rip the 2x12s to width and cut them to length with electron power being careful to cut out the pith and to match the grain to control warping and for flattening the top with a hand plane. I also stickered them with spacers for drying after I cut them to let them stabilize a bit.

For the glue up, I didn't have a big glue table with tons of clamps, so I screwed the pieces together removing the screws after the glue set. I broke several screws and had to buy larger diameter screws to control this. I found it also helped to remove the screws after the glue set but before it hardened. It was also a bit of a trick to keep it all straight and aligned as I glued it up. It wasn't perfect or pretty, but I made the top thicker than it really had to be for just such an eventuality.

In these pictures, you are actually looking at the bottom of the bench. Since I didn't have sawhorses, I set it on its legs in order to plane the bottom with the top mounted upside down on the legs. Wish me luck on getting a couple of the legs back out tomorrow.

The first picture doesn't do justice to just how rough the top (bottom actually) was. The boards were misaligned by about 1/4" or even more not counting any twisting bowing or cupping.

I used a jack plane with a rounded iron to "scrub" the surface from side to side and then finished off with another jack plane with a straighter iron still working from side to side.

This last picture is a closeup of the "finished" bottom. All it lacks is a couple of coats of danish oil or suchlike. It is still terribly rough, but I don't work on the bottom of the bench, and it will take a clamp just fine. And if I don't move along, I won't have a top to work on.

Luke

Workbenches: From Design And Theory To Construction And Use by Chris Schwarz is a book that every amateur hand tool woodworker should study thoroughly.

For most hand tool woodworkers, there is no more important tool in our shop than our workbench.

I just don't know how I can overemphasize the significance of this book. If you are thinking about buying or making a workbench, you should just get it. If you must, borrow it, but get it.Read more