workbench

My extra long “English” workbench is done. The plan came form Christopher Schwarz’s excellent “Workbenches from Design & Theory to Construction & Use.” I lengthened it to accommodate the longer workpieces commonly found in boat building. It is 12 feet long and 2 feet wide.

Although made of common construction lumber (aka rather ugly Douglas fir), and with a thin top compared to some cabinet builders benches, it ends up being rock solid. While contemplating extending the length, I asked Chris if he thought a third set of legs would be needed. He suggested they wouldn’t hurt and pointed out a photo in his book of a bench with three sets of legs. I took a cautious approach and made the center legs a fraction of an inch short. The last thing I wanted was a teeter-tottering bench. Well, there’s no teeter-totter, and not much we can do to make those legs touch the floor. Maybe if I plop my truck engine on the bench? This is what they invented wedges for, isn’t it!

The Gramercy holdfasts from “Tools for Wood Working” work very well. They do need a top thicker than what I used. So, like I did for the dogs, I added doubling blocks under the holdfast locations. They’re great tools at an attractive price.

All of the lumber dimensioning and most all of the fitting and construction was done with hand tools. The only things I used electrons for were:

• My old $10 hand drill helped with the large holes for the lead screws for the vises. As an aside, this is an amazing drill. It was a “no name” metal bodied $9.95 special in the early 1960s. I’ve used it almost continuously since them for the usual DIY stuff.  It has outlasted two cordless drills and shows no signs of giving up.
• I used the band saw to nibble away the waste near the curved areas of both vise faces.
• A semi-retired miniature lathe and some idle mahogany were used for the ends of the vise handles.

Building the bench offered a few really interesting techniques: the use of Miller dowels for fastening the top (no metal to catch a plane while flattening), the use of drawboring to really tighten up a mortise and tenon joint, and the use of a wedged tenon for the parallel guide at the bottom of the face vice. Each technique was easy to learn, thanks to well written instructions, and each produces very strong joints.

Two coats of boiled linseed oil provide enough finish to keep blood from soaking into the top. Don’t ask how I know that.

Once upon a time (dead link now): “approved by the Schwartz.”

Now, back to boat building.

The last two boards are on, bringing the width to 24 inches. Flattening is simple; just takes time and 2.3 Snicker bars worth of energy. The big ole No. 7 jointer was set up rank and swept diagonally until all boards were brought to the same thickness. I then set it for fine work and used along the length of the boards to remove the diagonal marks. The heft of the jointer, along with a razor sharp iron and a constantly waxed sole (candle wax), makes it a very effective and enjoyable tool.

The No. 3 smoother feels petite in comparison, and was set up for petite, lace like, finish work.

The keen observer might find some strange holes in those last two boards. No, they’re not for holdfasts. Those boards each had a few dead knots in them, the kinds surrounded with a black ring of bark where the tree grew up around dead branches. Those kinds of knots tend to be loose, and in boatbuilding they must be removed and plugged lest they become unplanned drain holes. Here, I just knocked them out and left them unplugged. Made planing easier.

It turns out to be exactly what I expected. Al Navas would want better, but this is perfect for its intended use and a good bit better than what I’ve seen in many boat shops.

Every respectable woodworking bench has dogs and a vise for clamping work against the dogs. There are several styles of dogs commercially available. Most of them are metal, and I prefer keeping metal as far away from my plane irons as possible. I decided to make, rather than buy, my dogs and settled on 1 inch square dogs made from ramin hardwood square sticks that are readily available at the home center.  The spring leaf for each dog is 1/8 inch thick cedar, leftovers from a little resawing project. A notch is cut for the leaf along one side of a dog, and then a cabinet maker’s rasp cuts a short angle at the end. A brass screw attaches the leaf. I borrowed the design from Stephen Sheppard.

OK. Next we need holes for the dogs, and a vise. Two boards were use to form the holes, one to hold all 25 dog holes, and the other to close them. Since this bench has a thin top, the depth of the dog holes is doubled by gluing another board below, making the bench twice as thick along the row of dog holes. All holes were hand sawn and chiseled. They are remarkably similar in size.

The vise is a very simple Lee Valley front vise that I’m using as a tail vise. The face block for it holds the moveable dog.

The usual procedure for building a bench is to glue up the entire top all at once. I have strayed from that path for two reasons. First, I don’t have a reliably flat reference surface 12 feet long that I can use for the glue up. Second, I imagine that the accumulated weight and length would make the complete top heavier than I can manage alone. So, I’m adding a board at a time directly to the bench frame. Attachment is a combination of glue and Miller dowels.

There are a lot of rough edges at this point: the top surface of the boards are not even with each other, the boards are slightly over length, and the vise face needs trimming both on the top and on the side that ajoins the apron. All will be resolved when the top is complete. Way down at the other end is a 2 inch by 2 inch planing stop, made of the same ramin as the dogs.