Dimensioning 10/4 lumber for bench build...How to go about it?

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

First, a minor brag. I got lucky with this yellow pine.
IMG_5165.jpgIMG_5166.jpgIMG_5167.jpg
Six pieces that are over 2" thick, 72-76" long, mostly knot-free, and most of the pieces are close to quartersawn. About 66 board feet total. I'm not sure how much quarter-sawing matters with softwoods given that I never see it but it got me excited. The guy had a yellow pine slab that was 20 ft. long and pretty clear he wanted to sell me but I don't have the means to transport it nor the energy to break it down.

Anywhoo, I'm finally breaking down and building a real workbench. I've settled on a Moravian bench like Will Myers' because it's easily broken down for moving and it's the lightest design I've seen that will still hold up to the type of work I hope to be doing.

My main question is, how would you guys go about breaking down these pieces for the benchtop? Will Myers' plans call for a top that is 76"x13.5"x3.5" and these pieces I have are all about 2.25" thick and 8" wide. Would you laminate two pieces face-to-face to get the necessary thickness? Or would you rip pieces that are 3.5" wide, then turn them on their sides and laminate those face-to-face so that the benchtop is all edge grain?

Thanks!

[Mike Baker 2]

That's lovely pine, IMO. But I'll let the experienced guys here answer your question.

[William Fretwell]

The edge grain top makes the most sense and provides the best chance for the glue surface to mate well. I would plane the surfaces before ripping for more control. One thing to note is as you glue up the surface may cup or bow so allow some extra to plane down to flat. How much you can judge as you see how the faces match up. You will still have lots of wood either way.

No Idea what work you plan or if the 'light' design will be heavy enough.

Some large English workbenches would have a thinner top and just edge join such boards but those benches tend to be huge.

[Brian Holcombe]

I'd take Stan's approach, which sounds excellent to me.

One thing, make sure you orient the board so that they plane the same way (grain should rise in the same direction on each board). That will make future flattening a breeze.

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

Ha. I have absolutely made that mistake in the past. Lucky for me it was on a 30" long table top and the grain was rising very shallowly so I could smooth it with a high angle plane without much tearout.

[Stanley Covington]

I'd take Stan's approach, which sounds excellent to me.

One thing, make sure you orient the board so that they plane the same way (grain should rise in the same direction on each board). That will make future flattening a breeze.

A very astute suggestion.

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

The edge grain top makes the most sense and provides the best chance for the glue surface to mate well. I would plane the surfaces before ripping for more control. One thing to note is as you glue up the surface may cup or bow so allow some extra to plane down to flat. How much you can judge as you see how the faces match up. You will still have lots of wood either way.

No Idea what work you plan or if the 'light' design will be heavy enough.

Some large English workbenches would have a thinner top and just edge join such boards but those benches tend to be huge.

I would tell you what I plan to work on except I also do not know. Nothing huge in the foreseeable future, though. Either way, one thing I do know will be in my future is a decent amount of moving so a bench that can be taken apart is important to me. The Moravian design seems to work well enough for other folks so I'm not too worried about the weight. Mine would end up being heavier if I make the actual work surface wider than the 13.5" in Will Myers' bench, and right now I'm thinking I'll do that. On his bench there's an 11"-wide tool tray behind the work surface, and I don't see myself needing that much space in a tool tray.

[William Fretwell]

I would tell you what I plan to work on except I also do not know. Nothing huge in the foreseeable future, though. Either way, one thing I do know will be in my future is a decent amount of moving so a bench that can be taken apart is important to me. The Moravian design seems to work well enough for other folks so I'm not too worried about the weight. Mine would end up being heavier if I make the actual work surface wider than the 13.5" in Will Myers' bench, and right now I'm thinking I'll do that. On his bench there's an 11"-wide tool tray behind the work surface, and I don't see myself needing that much space in a tool tray.

If you have a narrow bench then the tool tray becomes very useful to keep the work surface available and the tools to hand. The legs are key to keeping it mobile, if they dismantle easily then just wrestling the top becomes your primary concern. Trestle legs with wedges break down easily but the top can be hard to manage in hardwood for one person. My top is 240 lb so requires two strong people to manage but the bench breaks down easily.

Like you I dimension my rough lumber by hand. It is lots of work for hardwood. Your biggest challenge by hand is keeping the boards flat, both sides so you can glue the faces together with few gaps. Some small gaps will make no difference but you want the top to remain flat as you progressively glue it together. When you start out you can convince yourself it's pretty flat, not much of a twist, hardly cupped, only a little bowed etc. The final product will remind you forever that you were wrong! That's how we learn.

The suggested dowel alignment method would work well. Biscuits can do the job but require an accurate reference face, even a little off guarantees they won't line up. Dry fitting will tell you whether to ignore a particular biscuit and cut a new one. Glue ups on the large scale can move so some alignment aid helps as does a lot of beefy clamps.

Finding someone with a large thickness planer to prep the faces will give you a huge head start, you can do the edges by hand and it will become a long weekend job for the top.

[Stanley Covington]

First, a minor brag. I got lucky with this yellow pine.
IMG_5165.jpgIMG_5166.jpgIMG_5167.jpg
Six pieces that are over 2" thick, 72-76" long, mostly knot-free, and most of the pieces are close to quartersawn. About 66 board feet total. I'm not sure how much quarter-sawing matters with softwoods given that I never see it but it got me excited. The guy had a yellow pine slab that was 20 ft. long and pretty clear he wanted to sell me but I don't have the means to transport it nor the energy to break it down.

Anywhoo, I'm finally breaking down and building a real workbench. I've settled on a Moravian bench like Will Myers' because it's easily broken down for moving and it's the lightest design I've seen that will still hold up to the type of work I hope to be doing.

My main question is, how would you guys go about breaking down these pieces for the benchtop? Will Myers' plans call for a top that is 76"x13.5"x3.5" and these pieces I have are all about 2.25" thick and 8" wide. Would you laminate two pieces face-to-face to get the necessary thickness? Or would you rip pieces that are 3.5" wide, then turn them on their sides and laminate those face-to-face so that the benchtop is all edge grain?

Thanks!

Do you have an electronic jointer and thickness planer? Do you have a tablesaw or glulam saw that will cut 4.5"?

You wrote that they are all "about 2.25" thick and 8" wide." You also wrote that the plans you have call for 3.5" thick X 13.5" wide top. If that is your goal, and assumming you have the tools mentioned above, this is what I would do.

1. Scrub the boards down with a steel brush to remove embedded grit and oxidized wood.
2. Trim 1/4" off the each end of each board to eliminate embedded grit that will dull your blades and scratch your beds. You may not see it, but grit is always there.
3. Thickness plane 4 boards, and joint one edge of each. They don't need to be the same exact thickness, but they do need to be free of twist, and mostly straight. A little bow is not a problem.
4. Number the boards to maintain orientation.
5. Clamp 2 adjacent boards together face to face and with the jointed edge top, and drill a series of holes located 2" and 6" down from jointed edge, distributed near the ends and in between. Too many holes is better than too few.
6. Repeat the aligning and drilling until you have enough holes for dowels to keep all 4 boards in alignment with each other
5. Apply wax to and drive a dowel of the corresponding size into the holes of two adjoining boards. Alternate holes so only half of them are used during this first glueup. The dowels should be slightly shorter (1/4"?) that the combined width of the boards, and their ends recessed. These dowels will keep the boards in alignment during glueup.
6. Glue, clamp, and let cure 2 adjoining boards for 2 days (make sure the wood is warm prior to, and your workplace is warm during cure).
7. Repeat for the other 2 boards. You should have 2 gluelams now.
8. Rip each glulam in half, and dimension each to the same width. You should have 4 glulams now, each approximately 3.75"wide x 4"thick (depending on how much waste was lost to dimensioning).
9. Insert waxed dowels in the remaining holes.
10. Glue, clamp, and cure these 4 glulams, in 3 sets or all at once, to make a single glulam approximately 3.75"thick X 16"wide.
11. Cleanup squeezout.
12. Flatten with handplanes.

If this is too wide (sounds just right to me, and I would want the extra mass, space permitting), then mill the boards thinner to begin with, e.g. 1-11/16"

This will let you glueup a top with the minimum waste and without a helper (asuming your back and knees are OK). If you don't have the powertools, then the same thing can be accomplished using handplanes and handsaws, it will just take longer and you will lose weight. You will need at least 10 heavy duty bar clamps or pipe clamps.

Stan

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

Stanley,
First of all, thank you for the detailed reply. It gives me a lot to think about before beginning this ordeal. I've never used dowels before and hadn't thought about it until now.

I'm confused about the process you propose, though. Maybe I'm misreading something but first I would glue two boards together edge-to-edge. Doing this twice would give me two laminated boards that are about 16" wide and 2" thick. Then (step 8) is ripping them in half again? Wouldn't I just be cutting right back through the glue line and undoing the previous step?

Oh, and as for power tools...I don't own any of those things myself but I figured for this project I'll probably have to borrow some or have a local cabinetmaker make some cuts for me. I'm not sure if I'm enough of a masochist to do it all by hand. We shall see. Maybe I'll have a vision or some superior force will command me to do it the old-fashioned way.

[Phil Mueller]

Hi Matthew, not edge to edge, but face to face. Each of the two glue ups would end up being about 4.5" x 8". You then rip each of those (halving the 8") to get two 4.5" x 4" pieces. You would now have four 4.5" x 4" pieces. Glue those up for about 18" x 4".

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

Update:

Finished planing a few of the boards to make the top. I picked the boards that were the straightest so that I could minimize how much thickness had to be planed off. Two of them are mostly knot-free and turned out great, and one of them is nice and straight but has a few bit knots. Hopefully those won't cause any issues. They seem stable enough.

Now, the next move is to either laminate a couple boards face-to-face or rip first and then laminate. I'm thinking the latter because:
1) I am using a circular saw with a fence to rip and its maximum cutting depth is 2-1/2"
2) More importantly, I think it will be easier to get a solid, gap-free glue up with thinner boards rather than two massive boards

But before I get to that, I have a decision to make. The straight boards that will be the top ended up being 2" thick and 9" wide. Originally I was thinking a 3-1/2" thick top because that's what Will Myers used and it seems like a good balance between stability and portability. But these boards being 9" wide, if I decide to go with a 3" thick top I can rip each board into 3 and end up with 3 2"x3" pieces from each board. If I go the 3.5" or 4" thick route I can only rip each board once and I'll have some waste left over.

If it doesn't cost me any stability or function then a 3" thick top would save me some wood which is nice, and perhaps more importantly it would ensure that the bench top is light enough for me to move by myself. Will Myers' bench top is 13-1/2" wide and 3-1/2" thick and weighs somewhere around 90-100 pounds. My plan is to make my bench top a little wider, closer to 16" wide, so if I make it 3-1/2" or 4" thick it might become too heavy for a single person to move. At 3" I can probably make it 16" wide without losing that ability.

In conclusion, do you guys think 3" is thick enough? What would I gain with an extra half inch or inch of thickness besides a little stiffness?

[Brian Holcombe]

If it were hardwood, I would think 3" would be fine, but given that it's pine I think you should aim for 4". 16" wide is pretty good.

[Robert Hazelwood]

I think 3" would be acceptable, especially if you need the bench to be portable.

If your benchtop is the same length as Will Myers', and you are both using SYP, then yours would weigh about the same as his if you make it 3" thick at 16" wide. If you make it 4" thick @ 16"w, then it would be about a third heavier than his.

Yellow pine is rather dense and stiff for a softwood.

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

I think 3" would be acceptable, especially if you need the bench to be portable.

If your benchtop is the same length as Will Myers', and you are both using SYP, then yours would weigh about the same as his if you make it 3" thick at 16" wide. If you make it 4" thick @ 16"w, then it would be about a third heavier than his.

Yellow pine is rather dense and stiff for a softwood.

That's what I was thinking. The E value (measure of stiffness) of SYP is pretty high. Having never experienced a real workbench, though, I figured I'd better ask folks that have. I suppose I could make it 3" and down the road add another inch of thickness via face lamination if necessary but for some (perhaps arbitrary) reason that idea bothers me.

I realize that in terms of functionality thicker never hurts but I have to consider portability as well since this thing is likely going to be moved from time to time.