Rough Wood

Please note that there is an earlier post with more details about construction, which can be found here. Thanks!

It’s finished. Last night I put the final touches on the workbench. After a few coats of finish on the vise it was ready to assemble and put to work. I immediately made some bench dogs. It was a true revelation to have a real vise and a relatively stable surface. It’s not a massive, stationary bench, but it’s so much more than I had. It was made with hand tools, with the exception of the use of a drill for the many, many holes.

Here it is with the vise handle removed and ready to break down. The gray discs on top are what I call “bench slippers.” They are short bench dogs with nylon furniture glides attached. When the legs are removed, and the surface is flipped over, the slippers are inserted and the bench can be slid around on wood floors without damaging them. More on that later.

My design is literally full of holes. I made a large array of dog holes in the surface. It may seem like overkill, but I expect to use random things like the Veritas “surface vise,” as well as using dogs to box in various rectangles on the surface. With only 1 vice to handle all tasks, flexibility is key.

The vise works quite well. It feels very stable and predictable. My only complaint is that it screeches a bit, even after extensive waxing. Without a drill press, the angles on the screw and the 2 guide rods are not perfect, so there are various slightly opposing forces involved. It works great though, being both smooth and steady. The external garter works like a charm. The sapele face/chop is working great and looks amazing. There are more details on its construction here and here.

If I did not have soft wood floors (bamboo) I would have bought a metal vise and been done with it. Sometimes things work out for the better, because I really like this vise (so far). If you have the means to make the bench but not the vise, buying a metal one is definitely an option. The vise is by far the most complicated part of this project.

Once broken down, which involves removing the two leg assemblies, the main surface sits flat at about 5″ tall. With the 2 leg assemblies, it breaks down to a stack about 8″ high (+ the glides).

In the end, I had purchased about $40 worth of wood for the bench itself ($30 for the poplar top, $10 for the 2x). The vise is scrap, other than the face. If you have scrap around you could use that and make adjustments to the design. I bought knobs and long carriage bolts for temporarily joining the leg assemblies to the top, but don’t think I’ll need them. I used about $4 worth of the huge sapele board that I bought for this and other projects. Add $20 for the hickory dowel and we come in at around $64 for materials.

Here’s a link to a SketchUp file of the final build. There is no joinery in the Sketchup. Dog holes are represented by black cylinders so they can be rearranged. Please keep in mind that I am left-handed. If you are not, you might want to consider the orientation of the vise.  If you build it, please let me know, as I’d love to see it out in the wild. Please note that it does flex in the short direction due to the lack of stretchers there. I may add some supports that can be temporarily bolted in, but I want to use it a bit first. It’s quite solid in the long direction due to the existing stretchers.

Now I can actually build some stuff… Next comes the tool cabinet!

I started building the knock-down workbench about a week ago. I’ve been trying to write a post about it since I started, but various things have conspired against me. So this one is a doozy.

After further consideration for the directions of the forces involved, I’ve made some design changes. Many thanks to readers Dean and Dyami for other suggestions.

I’ve placed the stretchers along the long axis, as this will be the direction of the most forceful planing. Most forces along the short axis (in the vise), like jointing, will require more precision than sweat. I’ve also redesigned the leg bracing. The legs are now entirely enclosed, so they  fit into very tight mounting braces made of various pieces of 2×4 material squeezed tightly together.

I have the hardware for using 3/8″ carriage bolts (with knobs) to anchor the legs in, but they are quite sturdy. I got a real workout trying to get them out the first time, after having clamped the bracing tightly together to screw everything in. Yay for thoroughness!

An interesting side note: I waxed the ends of the legs so they will slide into the mounts more easily. This fit is not based on friction, so it doesn’t have to be grabby. There’s 3.5″ of vertical support in the braces, so they aren’t going anywhere. I also waxed the shoulders of the lap joints. Since glue would be pointless here, I wanted to reduce the tendency for the bench to creak under pressure. It is, thankfully, not a noisemaker like the old one.

The frame is joined with pocket screws and large timber screws, because, really, why go through the trouble of doing mortise and tenon joinery in squishy 2×4? I will very happily move on to a more substantial bench whenever I have the space, but I didn’t need to spend weeks on this one.

The top is 3/4″ poplar (actual 3/4). I found 11.25″ boards, jointed them with my fantastic new Veritas jointer fence and did a glue-up that worked rather well. After a small amount of planing, it’s incredibly flat, in spite of my not having had anything flat to make it on. There was a little wind in the frame, but I planed it out, and everything on that front is nice and stable. Notice the lip on one side. I’ve designed this overhang due to my abundance of clamps that have a 3-4″ clamping range. The primary series of dog holes will be along the opposite long edge.

A threading kit arrived yesterday, so I’ll get started on the vise soon!

This thing is really coming together. What amazes me is that in the course of working on this I’ve seen exactly how not-flat my Workmate surfaces are… I don’t know if it was this warped when I first bought it. It flexes quite a bit with heavy planing and has probably bent over time.

I have experienced a few very surreal moments during this process. The first was when I faced the task of planing the top, connected to the frame—because it’s thin enough to flex without the support. The only waist-height surface at my disposal was my old/current bench. This bench surface is about 4x larger than the Workmate, so I had to work out a way to support this relatively massive structure on the Workmate. The solution was to attach a pipe clamp under the new bench surface, which was hooked onto the old surface as if the new surface were a gigantic bench hook. Remarkably, it worked with some clamp support on the far end to keep it from tipping. This photo might explain better.

A bench bench hook?

Another really weird moment came when I started to trim the mating surfaces of the laps with my (also new!) router plane. The new bench was assembled for some measurements. Since I was working on the stretchers, the bench was just standing there taunting me. So I clamped a stretcher on it and started doing some trimming. It was so automatic and comfortable, as opposed to the old bench—which would always take some crazy contraption to hold things down—that I actually got some work done. I didn’t have to think about it. That is, until it started sliding across the floor because it wasn’t fully assembled. I didn’t want to go very far with it, but I couldn’t help myself.

The glue on the stretchers is dry, and it is rock solid in the long direction. It is flat and stable. A bit of additional weight from the vise gear should help to keep it from tipping at the end. I can’t wait to be able to use this thing.

Also, carnage shot:

[update] Please see the latest on the completed workbench, which went through some redesign.

First things first.

Before I tackle my tool cabinet project, I need a workbench upgrade. I’m definitely on a plateau in regards to my collapsible bench. As my upper body strength has developed I’ve been flexing the Workmate more, and my patience has worn thin. It’s an interesting observation—I had read that one can’t do proper planing on anything but a nice solid workbench, but I did for almost a year. That worked because I was not physically capable of hogging as much wood as I could have, and as my ability to cut deeper and deeper has increased, so has the amount of force that I can exert.

That, or my bench is flimsy and is finally giving out. I prefer to think the former.

So I’ve taken some cues from my knock-down saw bench project and have been working on a knock-down workbench. I am still working out some details, like how exactly to make the temp/knock-down joints for the legs the most stable, with the least fuss. Here’s where I am so far. It looks simple from the top:

It looks a bit like a”real” bench, except it’s 36″ long and 24″ wide. There’s an apron, but the top panel is on top of the apron rather than being inset in rabbets like many workbench designs. This is purely due to portability and wanting to keep as much of the thickness as possible in the structure. I’d also like to be able to swap the top out once it wears. Tan geometry is 2×4, darker stuff is hardwood.

By design, it fits under my bed when disassembled. Yes.

I researched vises and am leaning towards making my own with a thick, solid piece of wood that is guided by thick hardwood dowels, with a mechanism based on wooden screws. The metal flavors are heavy and unwieldy for something that needs to be portable, not to mention the damage that they could do to my floors…

I’m sure this all sounds flaky and bizarre to those of you who have the space for a solid bench, but when compared to what I have now, it will be like winning a low-grade lottery. Some day I’ll have my hands on the big bucks.

A great deal of attention has been paid to basic structure, knocked-down size, clearance for the vise (whatever it ends up being) and accessibility. I actually had a design that folded nicely, and used keys to lock the legs in place, but didn’t like not using the longest axis of the bench for the vise. I have also struggled with having enough clearance for dog holes near the edge, so I can put a planing stop on the end and do face planing of longer boards. In this design they are as close as 1.5″ to the edge.

In this most recent design, there are various parts which help to provide a solid base into which the legs fit. It would be supported on all sides by wood, except for the attachment face (the outside). The legs themselves have cross members which help to keep them from rotating in the joint. The last element to work out will be the mechanism for cinching the legs to the main body, and at this point I’m considering tightening knobs like the saw bench. The leg stretchers also provide a spot to rest a foot, for keeping the bench in place when things get hot and heavy.

Determination is my friend, friends. At least I now have a saw bench for the cuts.

Woodworking is a gift that keeps on giving. Or taking, depending upon your perspective.

As a number of hand tool bloggers have suggested, I have considered building a saw bench for a while now. Unfortunately, I have no real shop space, so I had to work out some alternate solution. I designed a knock-down bench made entirely of 2×6 construction lumber in SketchUp. I then headed to Home Depot to snag a few boards. You can guess what happened next…

All of the 2x stock was green. That is, except for the type that they claimed as being dried, and it felt literally wet to the touch. So I spent about an hour wandering the massive aisles doing a mental redesign, trying to make use of whatever they had. I used my trusty tape measure (and my trusty iPhone calculator) to work out what I could get away with—using what they had… and what I could get away with in my car.

Enter the knock-down saw bench:

And the belly of the conquered beast:

In the end, I had a 3/4 poplar top, roughly laminated 3/4 pine legs (1.5 total thickness) and 1.5 x 1.5 doug fir stripping as supports. Hey, you work with what you have… And as you can see from the photo above, this is what I have. No table saw, no band saw, no expensive jigs for resawing and tenoning. Just a Workmate and some tools, and a lot of stuff to make.

Sounds like a weekend!

Of course, along the way I made mistakes because I was rushing, as I was still pretending that this would be quick and painless. That’ll teach me. After some refactoring, I ended up with something quite functional and stable, and I’m already getting better sawing results. That can’t be sneezed at.

The legs have a shallow lap for a bit of registration against the support beams. In this arrangement, the shoulder helps to keep the legs from swinging in, while the mount point at the cheek, and the end of the board, keep it from swinging out. The hole through the cheek indicates where the carriage bolt is sunk into the outside of the leg.

The carriage bolt, entering from the outside of the leg, is tightened down by a 3-point knob on a washer. This is amazingly stable. I didn’t bother to cut mortises for the square bases of the carriage bolts, and simply tightened the knob until the soft pine compressed under pressure—so the mortise cut itself. I also didn’t need to worry about stretchers, but I don’t work with massive boards and am not particularly hefty.

A side-effect of the lap is that there is enough depth to allow for the legs to be joined together, back-to-back, for stowing away.

Once the entire thing was assembled and adjusted, I attacked something that I would never have attempted before—ripping a 1.5″ x 1.5″ strip in half. A clamp through the central slot assured stability while I sawed away at this strip of douglas-fir.

Further tests confirmed that I can actually cut a straight line, I have just been ill-equipped. Yes, this is just a saw bench, but this is the only way I could manage to have one in my woodworking life for now.

Hey, it works.

The knock-down saw bench is currently living under the footed sink/counter cabinet in my bathroom. The intention was to store it under the bed with the Workmate, the two of which would make strange bedfellows in more ways than one. Sometimes things actually work out for the better.

I’m inspired to consider whether this can be extended—maybe towards proper workbench status. Depending upon height, further stability tweaks, and a vise of some kind, I think it’s possible. The next stop for me, however, is a real tool cabinet. I might post a “shop tour” to make the point.

As will become a tradition for me, here’s a post-construction carnage shot:

I have on occasion thought that on the day that I have the space for a real shop I may actually shed a tear. Today, however, I am thankful for not having a shop.

It’s odd, I know, but it’s true. I have been in the process of making various tools for myself, and had an occasion to shape a handle for a marking knife. On this particular day, I did not want to drag out the various implements of my temporary/breakdown shop, and sat myself on the floor with a length of 3/4″ square cherry and a spokeshave. The freedom of not relying upon a workbench, stops and dogs, and all those fun things in woodworking that we all take for granted, led to a much more organic process. I wondered if we have become a bit institutional with all of the hardware, micro-adjusters, RPMs, jigs and precision.

It was definitely less precise, but for something as delicate and curvaceous as a tool handle, that was a good thing. How would you go about shaping such an irregular thing while it’s clamped or stopped, without a lathe? Maybe you wouldn’t, and maybe when thinking about this you’d flash back to seeing your grandfather sitting on his porch, whittling to pass the time or to enjoy his new (to him) pocket knife.

So there I was, sitting on the floor, whittling with a spokeshave in a one-handed fashion, wishing I had a porch but enjoying myself nonetheless. Maybe it’s not so crazy after all, because I have a cool new marking knife, and all I had to do was vacuum the floor afterwards.

In a way, it was also a bit like playing with my new toys on the floor, except with very shiny and sharp toys. That’s even better.