Cleat question

[Laurie Brown]

I am going to be making a long work bench along the same pattern as Norm's miter station. I have the show recorded and have watched it over and over and over but I can't find the answer to this question.

In the show, he uses plywood panels that are attached to each other using plywood cleats. Fine and dandy, but how do you attach these cleats where the total length is longer than the length of your cleat stock? I'm going to be building one of these 17' long, and I'm not sure how to extend my cleats that far. If I butt them end to end, that only leaves me 3/8" on the end of each cleat to screw into the plywood, which doesn't seem like much to me. If I rabbet both sides of the panel, that still is only about 1/4" on each rabbet with 1/4" in the middle, not much. Norm doesn't go into this on the episode, even though it's plain his bench is over 8' in length, probably over 10', too.

Anybody have the drawings or the answer to this question?

[Tom Seaman]

I built one similar, about 15' long. From my hazy memory, I think I notched the cleats so they overlapped at the vertical panels. If the cleats are 4" wide, this gave me 2 sets of 2" wide to screw into. If you glued/screwed the cleats together, probably no need to do it at the vertical panels.

I'm going to try to attached a crude sketch to show better and to see if this is what you are talking about.

[Laurie Brown]

Yes, Tom, that is what I was talking about. Thanks, I hadn't thought of that!