It's starting to look like a bench.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

I've been working on this bench top with a jorgensen vise, sitting on my sawhorse for a while. Today I finished up drawboring the base together. Want to clean up a few things while it's still in two parts, and hope to start joining the two together soon. Having it in two pieces is nice if for nothing else than it stacks in the corner much easier than when it was a whole bunch of different pieces. . .

It's not pretty, but it'll be nice to have a real bench.

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[John A. Callaway]

nice work, and I envy the air conditioned, in the house work space...

[Bruce Page]

I think you have the top on the wrong side. :p

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

I think you have the top on the wrong side. :p

I was wondering why I was having so many problems clamping work to surface the faces!

Still need to flip the darn thing over and tackle the mortises for legs. I think I need someone else around around to flip the top over safely.


nice work, and I envy the air conditioned, in the house work space...

It's nice to work in the house. AC would be even nicer, though!

[Chris Griggs]

Looking good Josh! Your almost there. A good bench makes every all aspects of handtool woodworking infinitely more enjoyable.

[Peter Pedisich]

Joshua,

Nice workbench, from base to top to dog holes! I am envious of your workspace... sunny, nice floor, wall storage. I hope to have a wood floor one day.

How do you plan to finish it? Would love to see more pics - detail shots of the vise mounting.

Pete

[Mike Holbrook]

Nice Joshua! But I can't tell you to get on with it ;-)

That base looks like you could use it for an elephant dance floor.

Nice SawBenches too. I'm jealous, but not far behind.

[Joe Fabbri]

Looks pretty to me! Thanks for sharing, and keep up the good work.

Joe

[george wilson]

I hope you are going to replace those flimsy legs!:):):) What wood are you using?

I really like making benches,but I'm a lot older than the last time I did it. It really is necessary to have a helper when dealing with moving the top .

The bench is looking very sturdy. I'm sure it won't move much when you are planing. When I bought a heavy Swiss made bench in the 80's from Garrett Wade,I still had to load it with wood underneath,to keep it still when planing wood. Many of those commercial benches have a thick area for the bench dogs,then a much thinner center section,and only about 2 1/2" square legs.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

Thanks for the kind words, folks. In my old digs, I didn't really have space to work indoors.


I had started to transition mostly to handtools, as all I had access to in the way of powertools was a tiny bench-top drill press, a router and tiny router table (which I ended up using for way too many things, and grew to just not really enjoy using, even though it was decent. Sold it a while back to make room, and because I just wasn't using it.) and hand-held power saws.

I suppose I could have done more work inside, but I didn't really have room for anything resembling a bench. Trying to find out how to do things with my limited tooling (and avoiding a trip to my fathers house just to use a tiny bandsaw (which I had to wrestle out of a hoarders garage, set up on a workmate and fuss with for 20 minutes to get it working, so I could make 15 minutes of cuts) really pushed me to the hand tool direction. Realizing that with practice, I could pretty much cut to any line if I could see it, and that I could still save money and buy rough lumber even if I couldn't afford or find anywhere to put a thickness planer and a jointer pushed me over the edge as it were.

So I did most of my work outside on the porch.

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Being that it was a three-story porch that had to support a roof too, and was recently constructed, it was relatively sturdy, but the work surface was small. Very small Of course, living in Vermont, it limited my woodworking times to the warmer months, although I was outside pretty late into the year, wearing gloves and a scarf and making a cuts in the snow. I got pretty good at finding weird ways to butt my work against the support members as I planed the surface of something, or clamp MDF across two parts of the porch to make me room to make something.

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Of course, back then I was mostly building guitars, so I could play in rock bands, (I thought I was saving money by building my own! As if!) so I didn't need much room.

When I met my now wife, and we bought this little place, the porch was much less conducive to using as a work surface. It's actually much less conducive to being a porch, period. Needs to get replaced someday soon, I suppose. But I realized that we had enough room I could carve out a little space in the back room to work inside. At which point I realized that a work surface that isn't tied to the ground and the surrounding structure needs to be a lot sturdier. A workmate does not cut it for handplaning, I learned this the hard way.

Tell you what though, it's nice to have enough room to get a full length board laid out, and still be able to make a full stroke without hitting the wall.

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Of course, sometimes I miss being able to brace my back against the wall as I work with heavy strokes.

This bench started as something sort of assembly table-sized, a butcher block laminate of maple I bought from a fellow on craigslist. The glue job wasn't the best in a couple of places, but it ended up being something like 50 cents a BF for maple that was already mostly dressed. I sawed it in half and face glued it to get the thickness, (hoping that staggering the joints would help reinforce the suspect glue joints - it may have actually made them worse as one of them has pulled apart a bit on the bottom - I'm either going to plough a groove and fill it with a strip of wood, or put butterflies across it) then added a couple of strips to make the square dogholes and widen it a bit. The finished maple top is 20" by five feet long (I have room now, but not much room!) and 3 5/8" thick .

I knew I wanted thick legs - if for nothing else than I've got a wooden vise screw on the way. I waffled a bit on the size - I figure with a smaller top I could get away with a smaller base (I mean, it's supported by sawbenches made of 2x4 material) but I figured bigger would add some more weight and keep it in place better. Finding ways to make the kitchen counter work as a planing surface was getting silly . . .

I ended up making the legs 3.5"x5", and the stretchers are 5 3/8" x 1 7/8" and 5 1/2" x 1 3/4" - mostly those things are the sizes they are because that was the size the wood I had made nicely. None of the legs are the same size, I lined up my outside edges and scribed the stretchers to fit. After ripping the lumber for the legs in half to laminate them, I just didn't see the point in ripping anything else just to make the numbers match up, or to shave off an inch of wood to hit the size I had marked out in my diagrams.

The base is all poplar. The discoloration on the front leg with the vise hole is kind of interesting - I bought these pieces a while ago, and I don't know if they were improperly kiln dried or what, but looking at the end grain, there was this dark "ring" about 1/8"-1/4" inch in from all the edges. That one face, as I planed it (that one piece was pretty cupped) I hit that, and as I went into it, it made these neat contrasting dark lines. I'll have to add a better picture. I was originally a little concerned - I don't know if meant the wood was case hardened or what, but they've stayed really stable for a couple of months after milling them, so I've gone with it.

I pushed the edges of the legs as far to the edges as I felt I reasonably could, thinking that someday down the road if I have more room, maybe I could make a longer top, and keep the bottom. I don't know if that's actually practical, but it doesn't hurt anything now, either.

I'm thinking of finishing the base with milk paint or something, since it's got to live indoors. For the top, I'll probably do the oil/varnish wipe-on mix. The mismatched grain on the maple makes finish smoothing it a little difficult, since the strips from the original glue-up aren't all in the same direction, so the finished surface is from transversing with my jointer plane, but I've been liking that slightly-rough surface from working across the grain.

Peter - the vise is just screwed in from the bottom, and then on the front edge, it's mortised in. It ends up an inch or two below the surface of the top of the bench. There's a big wooden chop screwed on, partly to give me a place to put a doghole in line with the strip, and partly to allow me to get away with less overhang on that end of the bench. I can try and take pictures later if you actually want, but that's pretty much it. It's like what Chris Schwarz shows for mounting a similar vise on one of his benches in his book, except the Jorgensen vise doesn't need a recess on the bottom. The only problem I had was a little bit of un-flat at the end of my benches' underside (or maybe the vise isn't perfectly flat, I never really checked) so there's a few bits of thin model-makers ply and playing cards serving as shims.

Oh yeah - I didn't feel like the lag bolts where holding well in the end grain, so at the suggestion of someone here, I drilled some holes from the underside of the bench and filled them with oak plugs (sort of like barrel nuts) so that the lag bolts screw into the face grain of the oak plugs.

Moved the benchtop a little bit today to get something the cat knocked behind it. I can definitely move it on my own, and could probably even flip it, but I'm not going to - it something slips, it's not going to be pretty, and I think better safe than sorry.

I need to ease the edges on the base - moved that today, and cut myself on the edges . . .

Oh jeez .. . sorry this is so rambling.