Alternate Workbench Materials?

[Steve Mathews]

I was fortunate enough to purchase a very nice workbench from another member on this forum that has temporarily replaced the need to make one. But I still find it enjoyable continuing my research on workbench designs and construction. After reading The Workbench Book by Scott Landis and part way into Workbenches by Christoper Schwarz I was surprised by the limited mention of materials other than wood being used. As an alternative to the traditional approach in making a workbench a YouTube video (link below) by Jeremy Schmidt describes using a concrete core wrapped in wood for the top. Comments? What about using steel in some parts of the workbench? How about some of the dense polymers available today for the top?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSJEy35J5vg&t=902s

[Jim Koepke]

Another recommendation often heard is to use locally available wood or material.

Being a woodworker it is only natural to consider making a work bench out of wood. Of course it doesn't really matter much until you think about using holdfasts, bench dogs or other bench accessories.

Mounting a new vise might be a bit tricky on a bench made with cement in the core.

A wood top allows one to place a new dog hole in a handy spot if so needed.

just my 362099.

jtk

[Steve Mathews]

Jim - Good point about adding future dog holes in concrete. How about High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE)? It's typically more dense than hardwoods used for workbenches and can be just as easily formed, maybe more so. Maybe one of the reasons it hasn't caught on is the price, which after doing a little checking can easily exceed the cost of hard maple.

I'm still surprised that in both of the books mentioned above how little attention is given to materials other than wood for the construction of workbenches. Does tradition play an inordinate role in this?

[Jim Koepke]

Tradition is certainly involved, It is kind of like being a high end cabinet maker but going to Home Depot when your kitchen needs new cabinets.

Wood is what woodworkers work. We can hone our joinery skills while making our own benches and tool storage units.

After a few years of nicks and dings a wooden bench can be cleaned up quickly with some hand plane time.

jtk

[William Adams]

There was a very interesting design a while back in a woodworking magazine which used pipe clamps and their fittings for much of the structure.

When I was very young, my father picked up a bunch of angle iron w/ slots and holes and some sort of not quite corrugated sheet metal (Marston mat?) and made a workbench out of it --- which unfortunately was left behind when we moved. I still have a short length of the angle iron, and have pondered making such a bench again.

[Ron Bontz]

I just made ( a quicky ) a 63" x 34" work bench out of laminated 2 x 4s and 2 x 6s for the legs and two sheets of laminated plywood for the top and bottom. The top is about 2.875" thick and has three jorgy vises mortised into the top. I only spent about $50.00 on plywood and what ever the contact cement cost. It is heavier than anticipated and rock solid. My main bench top is in the re work stage. Still nothing fancy, but quite functional. Some day I may even build a really nice bench complete with bench crafted vises. oooooo aahhhhhh. :D
Well, a guy can dream, can't he? :)362113362114362117

[Bill Houghton]

My bench top, made as a temporary bench when the boys were entering the teens*, is a commercial (thus, heavy) solid core door. The boys are now 45 and 40 respectively; maybe I should be thinking about a new temporary bench.

*I figured, why get fancy if the boys will just mess it up? I was right; removing the lake of glue from one son's project took a while.

[Steve Mathews]

Ron - Nice workbenches!

OK, here's my idea. Make a slab out of ground up HDPE (milk containers, etc.). There are plenty of how-to videos on YouTube. Something with a dimension of 36"x72"x4" should weigh around 400 lbs. Any cuts, holes, etc. that can be made on wood can be done on HDPE.

[Ron Bontz]

Well I will have to research that one. I have never heard of it. Any reason so wide? I work on mine from all sides, and wanted to be able to have more than one person working on the bench at once. Beyond that, they are just too heavy to move.

[Keith Outten]

If your already going to have a wooden bench in your shop and need a second bench you might consider metal. I have a steel bench with a 1/4" thick stainless steel plate for the top and angle iron frame and legs. I welded 2" receivers at both ends under the top so I can mount grinders, multiple vises and a host of other tools like benders, etc. This one is perfect for wet work like wet sharpening planer blades and chisels. I also need to polish Corian using wet sandpaper on occasion along with other chores for welding/grinding jobs and working on machines.

I have in the past placed plywood on top of the Stainless top when if fits a project. Because the steel table will handle more weight than most wooden benches and is lighter I use it to stack lumber on top and place it beside my planer when I am planing lumber. I also use the steel bench for lots of painting jobs, any paint that gets on the bench top is easily removed with a scraper or my ROS.

In the picture below I put a plastic sheet on top of the stainless plate and put my large heat press on top for a big sign project I was working at the time.

[Steve Mathews]

Well I will have to research that one. I have never heard of it. Any reason so wide? I work on mine from all sides, and wanted to be able to have more than one person working on the bench at once. Beyond that, they are just too heavy to move.

The size mentioned was just arbitrary to calculate the weight of the top using HDPE. The same size wood top would weigh about 100 lbs. less. I think HDPE for the top offers a lot of advantages in ...
Weight - It is more dense than wood.
Durability
Shape Retention - Once the top is level and flat it should stay that way as opposed to wood, which is affected by moisture and will move in time.
Repairability - Material is relatively easy to repair with plastic welding, etc.
The only disadvantage I can see is the cost, which can be more expensive in manufactured sheet form than wood. The idea of using recycled HDPE to make a home brew sheet was to reduce cost. I really don't know if it's possible on that scale.

The whole point of starting the thread was to explore alternative materials in making a woodworking bench, a topic surprisingly lacking in both of the books mentioned above.

[Brett Luna]

Christopher Schwarz described building a bench out of laminated veneer lumber (LVL, Microllam, Glulam, etc.) in Popular Woodworking a several years ago and I've read other articles about it as well. Interesting stuff with some advantages but me, I'm for natural wood. I think it's most amenable to the tools and techniques we know and use in terms of both construction and maintenance. Re: HDPE, I don't weld plastic, I wouldn't want to learn just to rehab a bench top, and if I did, I don't see myself appreciatively running my hand over it when I'm done.

[Ron Bontz]

I must confess. I do like running my hand over a freshly finished table/ bench top. Even the plywood made bench is nice and smooth. But for how long. Who knows. I am not sure I would want a HDPE top for a work bench, but I would think it would make an excellent glue up table. Nothing would stick to it. :) Interesting bench top idea, anyway.

[James Waldron]

I rather suspect that we won't soon see a 4" thick, 72" long bench top formed of recycled HDPE milk bottles. Particularly not as a small shop or garage or basement project. No matter how much milk your kids drink.

Debate is futile. (Apologies to Captain Picard.)

[William Adams]

I used an HDPE cutting board as the spoilboard (and for threaded inserts for workholding) on my Shapeoko 3 for a while --- it worked well, and had all the noted advantages, but one disadvantage which I worried about was it being slippery and increasing the tendency of things to shift (which fortunately never happened).

They do make large chunks of this stuff for making park benches and such --- might be more affordable (and are often made from recycled plastic bags).

[Mark AJ Allen]

I believe you don't see alternative materials because there is no real good reason to use something that's not wood; A wood bench properly constructed will do what it needs to. Seems to me like straying from that common path is going to result in extra time, effort or costs, for minimal gain. Unless you have some unique constraints or an exceptional scenario (maybe you got some free steel or concrete laying around?), I would stick with wood.

I did try to find LVL/Glulam for the bench top at the time when I built my bench but it was not commonly available for non-industrial uses.

[Stew Denton]

Hi Steve,

I see some disadvantages with recycled HDPE.

One is availability, there may be companies out there that make large thick sheets of the stuff of workbench size and thickness, but I don't know.

Secondly is a difficulty is possibly working with the stuff. Wood is nice since you can glue it, work it with the simple tools that we like, modify a top at a later date to install things like a traditional European type tail vise if you want, etc.

A third concern is strength, the issue being that you can't have much in the way of other types of plastic present. Having plastics that are fundamentally quite a bit different than polyethylene, polyptropylene, etc. present in the mix can greatly reduce the strength of the resulting product. That is one reason that recycled plastic products can often be found as things that don't require a lot of strength. You would have to get almost all of the non-polyethylene, poly-ethylene, etc. plastics out to get a recycled material that was as strong as the virgin material.

Another concern is long term rigidity, polyethylene is a thermoplastic, that is it is worked hot, extruded, molded, or what ever. Over a long period of time, it can begin to droop on the ends, etc. Long term, I think you could begin to see the stuff go out of dead flat for that reason. Once it is out of dead flat, getting it back to dead flat might be a bit of a concern.

Another issue might be cracking and UV light resistance. Milk carton PE is attacked by UV light and begins to crack and come apart after being in the sun for a while. Also, if the stuff is really cold and you hit it with a hammer, really hard, it might bread due it becoming inflexible and brittle due to the cold.

Another issue might be repairability. Small spots might be "weldable," but big deep cracks are another matter, and i think that they might be basically unfixable.

There are likely other concerns, but these occur right off the top of my head.

Stew

[Stew Denton]

Steve,

One short term option that has the advantages of being cheap and a quick build is 2 or 3 layers of 3/4" particle board.

There are plenty of disadvantages with this approach. It will need some support of cross braces under it, depending on how heavily it is used you might need a cross brace under it every 2 feet or 18." I doubt if you could plane it flat, and if you could it would make the plane iron dull in a flash. The stuff is porus, and you would need to seal it. It is only marginally water resistant, and would soak up water spilled on it, which is why it would need to be sealed with something like polyethylene, etc. It would not stand up to use as dog holes. Thinning the edges to make tongue and groove edge joints will weaken it greatly, etc., etc.

However, it does have advantages too. It would make for a very quick build, it is as cheap as anything you can think of, and it is flat enough for many uses. It is also resists deflecting better than plywood does, which is why it is used inside veneer for cabinet shelves, it won't sag nearly so much as plywood.

I worked on such a bench top that I used in a previous house for about 7 years, and it stood up all that time. I did a lot of the work that was part of remodeling that house using that bench.

It wasn't fancy, two layers glued and nailed together, nailed together to act as clamps until the glue dried, and the result finish nailed on top of some cheap kitchen cabinets that salvaged from the kitchen remodeling, that I had fastened together.

It could be made better than what I had, by using some 2X4 stock on the edges for mounting vises, to put dog holes, etc. The top would have to be inset in this using cleats under the PB, etc., since milling it for tongue and groove, etc., would weaken it too much. More simple upgrades could be done, compared to what I had, that would make it much more usable.

I may build such a bench when I hopefully get a shop, which will be used as a temporary bench to work on to build a good bench, or other needed items until time is available to build a better bench.

Another thing, it is easy to repair this type of top. If it gets too torn up, cracked badly, etc., the repair is you tear off the old particle board top, cut it up with a circular saw with a cheap carbide tipped blade, and throw the top in a dumpster. You then go to the lumber yard and pay a few bucks for more particle board for a "new" top. You can also glue on something like Masonite to make a more impervious surface.

Remember this is a temporary top, even though I used one for 7 years.

Regards,

Stew

[Kees Heiden]

This thread reminds us what a marvelous building material real wood is! It is strong, a 3" thick top won't sag, it is UV resistant, unafffected by heat or cold, not excessively heavy, easilly available and relatively cheap. Easy to be worked at home with simple tools too without ecological troubles or making a gigantic mess.

[Bruce Haugen]

This thread reminds us what a marvelous building material real wood is! It is strong, a 3" thick top won't sag, it is UV resistant, unafffected by heat or cold, not excessively heavy, easilly available and relatively cheap. Easy to be worked at home with simple tools too without ecological troubles or making a gigantic mess.(emphasis mine)

Ha! You haven't seen my shop during a project.

[Steve Mathews]

This thread reminds us what a marvelous building material real wood is! It is strong, a 3" thick top won't sag, it is UV resistant, unafffected by heat or cold, not excessively heavy, easilly available and relatively cheap. Easy to be worked at home with simple tools too without ecological troubles or making a gigantic mess.

No doubt about it, wood is an excellent material for a workbench, especially for woodworking. The only part I might argue with your list of attributes is the cost of wood compared to other products. In some parts of the US, hardwoods especially are very expensive. After doing a little more research it seems there is at least one company that already produces workbench tops using HDPE and other plastics. Apparently some have special applications where wood is not desirable. Unfortunately HDPE is still somewhat expensive in a form useful for a woodworking bench, which is the reason for my idea of using recycled HDPE. It's already being used by many for other traditional woodworking projects except not for a bench top as best as I have been able to find. I started this journey into thinking about alternative materials after reading the 2 workbench books mentioned earlier and viewing the video by Jeremy Schmidt on the concrete core bench top. I am usually not the type of person that goes beyond just thinking about possibilities but find it encouraging discovering those that take it a step further like Jeremy. The concrete core bench top may not be ideal but I applaud the effort in trying to discover something better. For those that haven't seen any of the other videos by Jeremy I encourage you to give them a view, many are woodworking related. You may not especially like what he makes but I think you'll be encouraged by the young man's enthusiasm. Sure beats watching a youngster on the news throwing rocks at a store window during a ??? rally.

[george wilson]

My benches in the museum shop were 4" thick hard maple. Mine at home is 4" thick beech. Wood costs money, and a fair amount of it if it is 4" thick. The museum paid for the maple benches. Might have been about $1,000.00+ in wood per bench. 4" maple is expensive, and has been getting harder to get, it seems. I got around that high cost by luck and planning: There was a little country sawmill here years ago. I bought a beechwood log they had and paid to have it sawn into 4" x 6" for the legs. Cost a LOT less than buying it from a wood dealer! But,I had to let it dry inside the toolmaker's shop for several years. I lucked out on the top when at another saw mill when working on the giant cider press. There was a 5" thick slab of beechwood about 30" wide and 10' long laying on the ground, but not yet spalted! Sure enough, there was a piece of barbed wire near one end. I drilled it out.After I got the beech planed to final thickness, I and glued and hammered in a boat shaped plug of beech. I have to look for it when I want to see it again! That, needless to say, made a great top once I got it dried. I didn't mind waiting for the wood to dry, as I had a small home shop back then. Now, it is in my shop. I made the steel parts for the tail vise myself, better than you can buy.

It doesn't shake in the least amount no matter what work I am doing!!:)

P.S. I advise NEVER make a bench out of oak. The cabinet shop was equipped with oak benches that must have been made in the 1950's. The grain structure of that wood is such that any little cross grain nick resulted in some long grain pieces of oak letting go. I never liked those benches, and somehow ended up with one of them for the newest apprentice to use.

[Kees Heiden]

My bench is made from pine/ fir. Not quite sure which one. It was dirt cheap. I glued 5 beams about 4x5" together.

When hardwood is too expensive then softwood makes a great bench too. But when experimenting with new materials is your goal, then be my guest of course. Just don't expect to improve anything.

I totally understand why the workbench books don't cover these experimental materials. It is too outlandish for a serious book.

[Pat Barry]

One thing to consider about plastic, for example HDPE,is that it will create and store quite a lot of static electricity. Sliding materials on it causes electrostatic charge. That will probably drive you nuts by attracting dust and be difficult to remove the charge. Needless to say, difficult to clean up sawdust, shavings, etc.

[Ted Reischl]

I just made ( a quicky ) a 63" x 34" work bench out of laminated 2 x 4s and 2 x 6s for the legs and two sheets of laminated plywood for the top and bottom. The top is about 2.875" thick and has three jorgy vises mortised into the top. I only spent about $50.00 on plywood and what ever the contact cement cost. It is heavier than anticipated and rock solid. My main bench top is in the re work stage. Still nothing fancy, but quite functional. Some day I may even build a really nice bench complete with bench crafted vises. oooooo aahhhhhh. :D
Well, a guy can dream, can't he? :)362113362114362117

I like it! You could beef up those legs very easily, well not the legs, but the stretchers between them. A shoulder adds a tremendous amount of strength to a joint. If you laminated some short pieces carefully fit between those legs you would essentially have a through mortise and tenon joint.

I have a "bench" I built for the cnc router made that way. The thing is heavy and it does not move at all.

One of the magazines had a guy who did the same thing using plywood. It was kind of ugly though.

BTW, the through mortise and tenons are needed from left to right going with the length of the bench if you are doing a lot of hand planing. Not so much front to back.

[Tom Bender]

Hi Steve
One of the things I find enjoyable in the shop is getting into alternate materials. My benches are mostly wood but one is small and is just a wood top on a cast iron pedestal. It's great.

I would definitely consider 4" or 6" steel pipe for legs, welded to channel aprons. The legs could be filled with concrete to add weight.

Or if a 2 legged bench, 8" pipe would have a certain aura of strength.

When chopping with chisels I really like a bench with mass right under the work. Concrete or steel with a 1" hardwood top glued directly to it would be interesting to try. Creativity needed to deal with expansion.

[Steve Mathews]

Along the lines of what member Tom Bender mentioned, while searching online yesterday for a small welding table to help construct a Jeremy Schmidt design 2"x72" bench grinder I came across a few that might also be helpful for woodworking tasks. The ones made by BuildPro and Certiflat for example have 5/8" holes spaced throughout the top on 2" centers for holding work. I was thinking that the table could also double for assembly of woodworking projects. Has anyone else done this?

Below is a link to a video by Jeremy describing the 2"x72" bench grinder build and where to get his plans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgiYpfma1nw