I finished my bench a few months ago. And since I used up more than my fair share of my wife's patience I got right to work on making some things for her and never got around to photographing it until today (that's the WW Magazine's Stickley Magazine Stand on the benchtop; hope you enjoy it, honey).
The bench was based on Chris Schwarz's "French Workbench" from his first book. I followed his method fairly closely but there were a few differences. I used ash, and my raw lumber was thicker than his dimensional SYP. So the legs are a little thicker, and there are a few less boards in the top lamination.
The most significant construction difference was that I don't own an electric jointer. Ok, to be accurate, I don't own one that works. My father in law gave me a HF/CM 6" jointer that has a bad switch (bad as in you push the 'on' button and sometimes it comes on and sometimes it doesn't. Likewise, once running you push the 'off' button and sometimes it turns off and sometimes not). A buddy of mine has me storing his HF/CM which does follow the basic rules of electrical circuits but when fully seated in the cutterhead the knives taper nearly 1/8".
Given the above, I flattened/jointed all the stock with my handplanes. Frankly, neither of the electric jointers mentioned above could handle the size of the workpieces, and moving 8' sections of ash (getting heavier with each glueup) would have been unwieldy/dangerous. And I suspect I saved more stock this way; the top is 4 3/16" thick after flattening. I would make the concession that a better approach to this build would have been to get wider slabs of less thickness similar to Schwarz's recent '18th Century Workbench'. And for the record, the workhorses in this effort were all vintage Stanleys: Sweetheart Era #5 and 7, and a type 8 (I think) #8. They're convalescing on the lower shelf.
Last but not least, I splurged and got the Benchcrafted vises. Since I built this project at a deliberate pace (some might use the word 'snail' in there) I was able to save up and buy the hardware several months apart. Somehow that made it less painful. And all pain from the cost subsided as soon as I put them to work. "Effortless workholding" indeed. Thanks Jameel.