Veritas Bench Bolts?

[Tony Shea]

I am in the planning stages of building a new bench. I have decided that it has to be a knockdown bench as I am currently bouncing around. My plan is def a Roubo style bench with a leg vise and a quick release tail vise as this is what I have on hand. I'd love to use Benchcrafted hardware for the Leg vise but am not sure if I'll be able to swing it right away. Either way I am going with a leg vise.

My question is about what size to make my legs, especially considering that I will be using one leg for a vise. I initially was planning on making them 5" sq. But after checking out the dimension on the bench bolts I don't believe this size will work, much too big. Would countersinking the head of the bolt deep enough to work comprimise the strength of the stretcher to leg joint? I think I'd have to countersink almost 2"! Or should I just shrink the size of these legs to around 3" to 3.5"? Would this be large enough to use a leg vise? Are there other options that I;m just not thinking of?

[Michael Peet]

Hi Tony,

The Benchcrafted bolts (scroll down) (http://www.benchcrafted.com/Benchbuilding.html) are longer than the Veritas bolts (http://www.leevalley.com/en/wood/page.aspx?p=31147&cat=1,41637), have beefier barrels, and are $0.50 cheaper. You may also consider a more rectangular leg cross section of say 6" x 4".

Mike

[Jim Koepke]

Another option may be to cut a hole in the leg perpendicular to the stretcher. You may need to do some creative cutting for this to work. Another solution may be to use a piece of all thread instead of a bolt. This would used nuts on both ends.

jtk

[Andrae Covington]

Well, if you countersink about 2", you're going to end up with about 3" in the leg, so about the same dimension as if you made the leg smaller. I don't think there's any harm in the deep countersink, and you still end up with the same amount of "meat" between the bolt head and the stretcher. Be sure to use the washers to help spread the load, especially if you are using a relatively "soft" wood like SYP or DF which can crush a little under the force. As Tony suggested, the Benchcrafted bolts are longer, and probably wouldn't require any countersinking, other than maybe for appearances.

As far as wondering if 3" legs would be large enough for the leg vise, that depends primarily on the size of the screw that you choose. You need enough width in the leg to accommodate the screw bore and still hold up the top. A metal screw will be smaller diameter than a wooden one.

Another option for breakdown is using "tusk" tenons, also called keyed tenons, which is what I did on my bench. The leg is through-mortised to accept a long tenon on the end of the stretcher. The stretcher is then mortised with one straight wall and one angled wall to accept a wedge-shaped key or tusk. It's cheap and in my experience it works just fine. Depending on how much the humidity in your shop varies, you may periodically have to go around and whack the keys. Same thing as adjusting the bench bolts, except you use a mallet instead of a socket wrench.

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[Ryan Mooney]

Countersinking also keeps the weight of the legs up vs going smaller. Heavier is (as I've discovered to my disappointment :D) better.

Don't get to hung up on the bolts, they're all basically just hardware store bolts, its the cross nuts that are the hard part to find. You can replace the bolts with locally obtained longer ones easily enough.

I actually made my own bench nuts. If you take a piece of thin wall 3/4" OD pipe and drill a 5/8" hole cross wise through the center of it you can just slide a 1/2" nut inside the pipe so that the opening in the nut matches the hole you drilled in the pipe and then the bolt goes through the pipe and into the nut then out the other side of the pipe (sorry if this is confusing, I spent 20m trying to get sketchup to do my bidding and failed horribly and the ones I made a buried deep inside a piece of wood). The nut fits inside the pipe tight enough to keep it from rotating. This was easier (at the time) than drilling and threading a piece of rod to make heavier duty ones..

Andrae - that's a great looking bench!

[Tony Shea]

Yeah i actually just ordered the Benchcrafted nuts and bolts. Kinda jumped the gun on asking the question.

I did think about tusk tenons but due to the large humidity changes here I wasn't sure they'd work out real well.

THanks for the help.

[Thomas Hotchkin]

Tony
I made my own barrel nuts, from some 1" dia. aluminum stock I had on hand. I damage one barrel nut, and was out of aluminum. I had 1" ipe kicking around the shop , which I turn round on the router table and thread. It has held as well as the other aluminum nuts. I did a test on another ipe barrel nut, I was able to put over a hundred twenty foot pounds of torque on it before threads started to pull out. Tom

[John A. Callaway]

Andrea, that is one super beefy bench... WOW !

[Andrae Covington]

Andrae - that's a great looking bench!

Thanks. I'll throw out a plug for the Show Us Your Bench (http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?124750-Show-us-your-Bench&p=1259363#post1259363) thread started by Leigh Betsch back in 2009. It has become large and somewhat difficult to navigate, but there are lots of great examples. Many people have also started new threads about their benches. I think it's helpful and interesting to see all the different approaches.


Andrea, that is one super beefy bench... WOW !

Nah, the top is only 3" thick. I have seen some here that could hold up a semi truck.:eek: Fairly substantial legs though. The legs are four 2x6's, which I think ended up being about 5-1/4 by 5-3/4. As Ryan noted, heavier is better, so I decided to use 2x6's instead of 2x4's. Also I needed the extra width for the bore for the 2" wooden vise screw.

It's probably the stretchers that make it all look so beefy. I think most people end up using relatively tall and narrow stretchers, something like 2x6 or 2x8; but I used two 2x4's glued side by side. So the stretchers are a little shallow, but extra thick. Mainly it simplified the tenon construction, as I just made one board long and the other short, providing instant shoulders.

[Trevor Walsh]

They are tapped for standard UC threads you could always buy a longer stock bolt in the same thread size.

[Mike Holbrook]

You might also check out another popular bench design, Bob Lang's 21st Century Workbench. Bob has an interesting break down design.

Try popularwoodworking....../video/bench for a teaser.