New guy advice.

[henke]

Evening lads.

I served my time as a maintenance electrician but for the last 14 years I've been working on instruments in the nuclear industry. So I work with my hands, I use power tools every day, but my knowledge of timber is limited - hence signing up on here.

I'm in the process of clearing out my garage and setting up a workshop, and i'm planning on starting with building a basic bench along one wall. With a shelf underneath for storage. I've had a good read through the forum, getting ideas and generally wishing I had the sort of workshop some of you chaps have. Who knows eh, eventually?

Anyway, from what you guys are using it's looking like the way to go is roughly the same height as a kitchen worktop but a good bit deeper, 900mm say. To be honest I already had a rough idea of the size of the thing. What I need to determine is:

The legs, what size? How far apart? The bench will be a shade over 5m in length.

The materials, what do I ask for at the timber merchant? I literally have no idea on the different types of wood / grades that I need. Can I get away with whatever is cheapest given the garage is dry and reasonable well insulated?

The rails, is it overkill making these as "fat" as the legs? Can I get away with narrow but deep?

Joints, how would you recommend knocking the thing together? I'm happy to buy tools to gain strength and stability, effectively kitting the place out in the process.

The shelf and the top, sheets of what?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers,
henke

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Get something up and running, don't lose any sleep over it. Your next bench will be better, and quite possibly your third will be better again. Loads of bench build threads here to read up on, but if you are asking advice can you give some idea of what you intend to make - if you are wishing to build jewelry boxes you'll need a different bench than if you intend to build lock gates.

 

[RobinBHM]

Is your bench for working with power tools or hand tools?

A hand plane needs a much more rigid bench than an electric router for example

 

[bourbon]

I've just extended my bench. I have my lathe and pillar drill opposite so I couldn't go too wide. used 7ft of 18mm plywood at 16 inches wide. It was on top of an original rough bench at one end so I knocked up two legs, one in the middle and one at the other end, Couple of brackets screwed to the wall, Job done. no real joints bearers screwed to the legs. It's solid enough for my bench grinder and bench sander

 

[sunnybob]

As far as height and depth. make the height to fit you. If youre tall, you dont want to be stooped over it for hours at a time. if youre short, no point having to stand on a stool.
depth depends how much floor space you have, but mine is around 700 mm. If you are thinking of making furniture then wider and deeper is good so it doubles as a lay out bench.

As far as build, that depends on what you want to do. Some folk will spend amazing amounts of time to build a bench or table. Some others (like me) dont give a damn about the tools to do the job, and use whatever is available to get the job done.

The two extremes are Andy's (Farmer giles) router table, which could easily be stored in anyones living room. The other extreme is me. This is my bench under construction. A salvaged metal frame, which I shelved with flooring chipboard and then a layer of T&G over the top. looks awful, but works perfectly.

 

[paulrockliffe]

Also, if you're building a 5m bench against a wall, you're not going to be moving it so you can get a lot of free strength limit a lot of movement just by fixing the bench to the wall.

I would start with something like 4 x 2 to make frames, space them roughly a metre apart and fix to the wall, run a stretcher top and bottom at the front between the frames to tie them together and put a top on to that. Run the bottom stretcher at the height of the lower horizontal frame element so you can run a shelf near the bottom. For the worktop I would put a kitchen worktop for at least 3m of it, depending on what size you can get hold of, then use something more substantial in the area where you're putting a vice.

But depending on how you plan to use it you could lose a bit of the material for no detriment.

The frames don't need the vertical bit against the wall, you could remove these and use angle brackets to fix the frames to the wall. Similarly your worktop will do the same job as your top front stretcher, so you might lose that too.

Softwood from any of the builders merchants will be fine, so long as you go and select it yourself and make sure it's reasonably straight. For a workbench you'll be OK pulling some of it straight as the dimensions aren't as critical as for a piece of fine furniture with fitted drawers etc and that design doesn't have any particularly long lengths of wood.

I would produce an exact design depending on the balance between cost, how nice you want it to look and what you're going to use it for. Also consider what you're going to use the space under the bench for? If you want to fit drawers you may want to fill between the frames with sheet material, or find a way to just use sheet material instead, so you can easily fit slides.

The other thing is, if you've not done much with wood and need a project to learn some stuff with, then making the bench nicer might be useful for learning/practice, in which case hand cutting mortice and tenons etc might be time well spent. Plus you end up with a nice bench at the end of it.