Bob Easton

Chocolate powered woodworking

Woodworking

Why we keep offcuts…

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photo of bench assembled, but still upside down

The Anarchist’s Workbench is ~mostly~ assembled, but it is upside down. How can I, myself, and me get it turned right side up? Yeah, I’m a hermit that won’t ask a team of strangers to throw their backs out. I’m also an enginerd with a simple understanding of physics. Here we see the bench resting on a couple of offcuts at each end, placed there to facilitate removing the clamps I used as levers for flipping the benchtop over. (See previous post.) Its time to engineer a way to flip the entire bench.

photo of bench turnover - 1 of 4

My F150 pickup truck has a great scissors jack that, fortunately, never gets used. Now is the time. First step, use it to tip the bench 90 degrees. Actually, I just moved it off center enough that tipping could be done with about 60 pounds of effort / control.

photo of bench turnover - 2 of 4

Start jacking up the back side. This is where the offcuts come in. I built two stacks of them while raising the bench. They serve two purposes, as a safety in case of sliding off the jack, and you’ll see the other purpose in the next paragraph. BTW, little patches of rubber shelf liner under the legs keeps the bench from sliding on the super smooth coated floor.

photo of bench turnover - 3 of 4

Keep on jacking. As the reach of the jack extends, let the bench rest on those stacks of offcuts and put a few offcuts under the jack to give it more reach.

photo of bench turnover - 4 of 4

It didn’t need much more to reach another tipping point, where with only about 40 pounds of effort I tipped the bench over by hand and let it softly land upright.

photo of top of the bench being scrub planed

Call the donkey back for more planing. Here, flattening the top is partially done with a #5 scrub plane. Needs more….

Yet to be done:

  • Finish flattening the top. (done)
  • Saw off the ends. (done)
  • Drill 16 holes for holdfasts. Schwarz has a pattern in the book. (done)
  • Build a chop for the vise.
  • Install the Benchcrafted Crisscross vise that I brought with me when we moved.

0 Boards remaining

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Three bundles of 6 boards each are ready. …almost. Those following my build of the Anarchist’s Workbench know what’s next; another glueup. Because this one is dealing with thick bundles of boards that have little flex, they need to come together without depending on clamps to close large gaps. Eliminate those gaps before gluing.

photo of #7 plane working on benchtop bundles

Steve Schuler, of The Literary Workshop Blog writes about liking lightweight planes. I do too. I do almost everything with a #5. Yet, for the first time in a dozen years I pulled out my big, 8 pound, 22 inch long, #7 to fine tune the mating surfaces of those 3 bundles. That Stanley #7 is a pre-WW2 era plane that I bought for working long boards used for boat building. Projects since then have been smaller and not warranted the extra length or weight. For this job, the weight is a bonus. Get that plane moving and it plows right through.

photo of full benchtop glued up and in clamps

I glued the bundles together with the top side uppermost so I could insure the top clamps closed everything up tight.

photo of rockers attached to the benchtop

Then… the next work needed to be done on the bottom. How does one person flip a 240 pound board over by himself? Rockers. Yep, I made a couple of rocker boards, screwed them to the back edge of the benchtop and used a couple of clamps as handles. Worked great!

photo of planes flattening the bottom of the benchtop

More donkey work. Down on the floor, I scrub planed the underside of the benchtop. No need for a fine surface here, scrub marks are OK. What was needed was a surface fine enough for marking leg mortises. With the undercarriage dry fitted together, I marked mortise positions using blue tape and a marking knife.

photo of drilling out mortise waste

Next, about lebenty-eight drilled holes, followed by chisel work, produced the mortises for the legs. All were drilled for drawboring and lots of pegs made from oak 5/8″ dowels.

photo of bench assembled, but still upside down

To afford “wiggle time,” I used Old Brown hide glue to glue up the undercarriage and then glued it to the benchtop. The mortises were snug enough to fit well, but loose enough to allow the 90 pound undercarriage to be wiggled into place. Lots of peg pounding brought all together. The only way it comes apart now is with a chainsaw. Can you spot the one assembly error I made?

Tomorrow, I’ll show how one person turns a 325 pound bench over without strain … and without cracking sounds (wood or bone).

Donkey work – 8 boards remaining

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No power planer? Use a donkey.

drawing of Christopher Schwarz's Anarchist Workbench
Attribution: Lost Art Press under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 4.0.

Schwarz describes building his Anarchist Workbench as mostly planing a bunch of boards and gluing them together. He emphasizes doing the planing and glue-up of any element (a leg, or a benchtop) in one day to avoid wood movement. That assumes a power planer. Well… I’m doing the job without a power planer, with only a couple of simple hand planes and a lot of “donkey work.” That makes me the donkey, and while it is tiring, it is also excellent aerobic exercise.

Schwarz also suggests using 2 x 12 lumber and ripping it into 2 sticks to make all of the 5 inch wide boards in this bench. I did that for the legs (16 sticks) and hated it. The best 2 x 12 lumber I can get here is #2 and not as nice as what Schwarz can find in his Kentucky / Ohio area. Our #2 Prime 2 x 12s have a very high resin content and knots as large as baseballs. OTOH, there’s an abundance of dry, straight, resin-free, 2 x 6 lumber with smallish knots. I’ve switched to 2 x 6 boards and find the donkey work much easier.

Colored chalk is for more than just sidewalks.

I arrived at a process by experience, and can now prep board for gluing fairly quickly. It goes like this…

  • Cut to length. I’m wanting a finished 8 foot bench, but know I’ll have to trim the ends. So, I cut boards to 8.5 feet, 102 inches.
  • Remove twist. There’s an important reason that Schwarz designated each board to be 1.25 inches thick, other than 4 x 1.25 equals an even 5 inches. After planing out the twist, there’s still enough thickness to get a 1.25 inch board from our standard construction lumber.
  • Determine which face and which edge will be front and top respectively. Plan for glue-up to follow the grain patterns that always place the bark side of a board facing the heart side of its neighbor. Mark the ends of the boards appropriately. See this article for preferred gluing directions.
  • Skim-plane one side of the board to ensure a flat surface for gluing. This is usually the heart side of the board, the side most likely to become convex.
  • Mark the edges for 1.25 inch thickness.
  • Plane a chamfer all around the edges down to the 1.25 inch mark and rub that chamfer with colored chalk.
  • Reduce thickness (the real donkey work) with a scrub iron in a #5 Stanley plane. I do this by diagonally planing across the width of the board with a setting as coarse as I can push. See those spiral shavings. Keep going until the chalk mark is almost gone, about 1/32 of an inch.photo of diagonal scrubbing
  • Change to lengthwise scrub planing to remove that last little bit of chalk mark and any noticeable high spots.
  • Follow up with a straight iron and light setting to smooth out the scallops from the scrub plane.
  • Next move to the top edge. Mark the board all around for 5.25 inch width.
  • With the board standing on edge, plane the width down using a Stanley #78 plane. Start with 45 degree chamfers from each edge, then knock off the peak to bring the width down. With very coarse cuts it goes fast.
    photo of Stanley #78 doing edge work
    I don’t aim for exact width here, because gluing up always leaves slight unevenness and that can be dealt with when a whole unit is complete. If it ends up at 5 inches great. If a bit more, no big deal.

Workholding on a temporary bench

This temporary, bouncy, booming bench has no vice and no planing stop. I make do by creating a planing stop from a couple of boards that I have screwed to the bottom of the bench.

photo of planing stop

Likewise, a couple of 1 x 2 boards screwed to the top of the bench make anchor points for a variety of clamping solutions. Not nearly as fast and easy as holdfasts, but OK. Pic below is looking down.

photo of clamping for doing edge work

Yes, we have no bananas.

The first group of 6 boards worked out with none having any appreciable bow. BTW, there are 3 groups of 6 boards that make up the benchtop. As I started the 2nd group, the first two boards had a slight amount of bow, not too much to be corrected during glue-up … unless the 2 together established a result like a banana. How to keep them free of bow while the glue sets? My solution was to use another board at right angles (no glue!) to pressure the bowed boards into straightness. The other factor is using a bunch of iron pipe clamps.

Here, we see the edges of the two boards glued together and behind them the board laid at 90 degrees that keeps everything straight. (Note to self: add some tape to the edge of the straightener board to prevent it from being glued to the others.)

photo of anti-banana clamping

It worked. No bananas.

My daily gratitude is for being blessed with good health, having a very short (20 seconds) commute to my workshop, and having plenty of time to spend with Eva. This 77 year old donkey is staying very active and is now only 8 boards away from completing the bench top.