Dimensioning by hand

[G S Haydon]

who really gets much utility out of a mediocre $15k highboy that's not much or any better than one that's $2k used.

it's a matter of calling the balls and strikes right, not whether or not only the home runs count as runs.

There's little or no demand for them for the most part (or any fine furniture) . You can pick up excellent Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian furniture of varying quality to suit your needs for relatively little. You'd struggle to buy the hardware and some of the timber, let alone turn the lights on. There are studio quality furniture makers like Marc Fish. I have a deep respect for his work and those like him but I can't imagine there are many.

Something like a Windsor style chair maker might make a go of it I suppose. Most cabinet makers near us make their money from custom kitchens and built-ins. The last one I spoke to couldn't remember the last time they made a free standing piece, another stopped as he was, for the most part making general joinery. He was previously and engineering guy and now looks after niche motorcycles.

 

[Jacob]

the double iron showed up and the cost of the plane went up with it. The idea that in the days of blacksmithing, creating a second iron that had to be fitted to the first, slotting the first, creating a screw and threading it (in the 1700s) was less expensive than putting more wrought iron in a single iron is false.

More "cost effective" means getting a better plane for your money, not necessarily cheaper. The double iron makes a better plane because the blade is more solidly held at the edge. That's what they are for.
It also means a thinner blade is possible which is easier to sharpen - which is nearly the whole point of the Stanley/Bailey design.

 

[Ttrees]

More "cost effective" means getting a better plane for your money, not necessarily cheaper. The double iron makes a better plane because the blade is more solidly held at the edge. That's what they are for.
It also means a thinner blade is possible which is easier to sharpen - which is nearly the whole point of the Stanley/Bailey design.

Nothing to do with rigidity Jacob, it was just a marketing gimmick

 

[Jacob]

Nothing to do with rigidity Jacob, it was just a marketing gimmick

Bevel up without a cap iron is more of a marketing gimmick. They have lever cap pressing closer to the edge, in place of the cap iron.
The chip "breaking" thing works with "difficult" wood if the cap iron is very close - making the plane perform a bit more like a scraper. But a scraper does it better!

 

[Ttrees]

Have you ever tried honing the cap iron's edge steeply to compare, i.e @50 or steeper,
or is this mere speculation?
You'll never be able to make a decision about it unless the plane is set up as such,
(easily notable, the shaving straightening will even tell you that)


Before learning how to use a cap iron as intended, I did buy a no.3 for
reversing ribbon striping, lol!
and an no.80 scraper plane, which led me to put my best stock aside, and find more agreeable stuff to work on, as dimensioning with those tools, (mainly the latter) is nuts for many reasons.

Night and day compared to actually doing the opposite now, and selecting the densest material for the job, as the same with selecting for figure goes.

Tom

 

[D_W]

Bevel up without a cap iron is more of a marketing gimmick. They have lever cap pressing closer to the edge, in place of the cap iron.
The chip "breaking" thing works with "difficult" wood if the cap iron is very close - making the plane perform a bit more like a scraper. But a scraper does it better!

The hump was the point, allowing for an inexpensive stamped cap iron instead of a thicker steel cap iron like the type ward makes.

Nobody can have a serious discussion about anything if someone claims to be very knowledgable about the cap iron and then claim that its purpose was other than improving the action of planing.

Texts talking about it started to go sideways around the early 1900s. I don't know what changed in shop woodworking by then - maybe that's about when machine thicknessers became common enough for a typical shop to afford.

I've run into a lot of people in the last ten years who talk about how much hand work they do and then claim that the cap iron is on a plane to hold the iron in and nothing else. It's really bizarre - it's not possible to not notice how much faster you can work with the cap iron set in bench work or planing a finished case without the risk of digging in and ruining something.

I know exactly two people who tried to do production work with hand tools only - not teach classes, not do site work, not anything else like that - and they took up the cap iron immediately.

When someone asks about how to dimension by hand, telling them that the cap iron doesn't have a function is just about the worst advice you could possibly give. Few topics on here are actually about dimensioning by hand, and it's easy to write it off if you finish things with machines most of the way. This is the rare case where someone is asking about it.

 

[thetyreman]

putting in a 5 degree difference from 45 to 50 on the cap iron edge isn't going to change your life, I tried it and it did nothing at all, no improvement, also tried 55 degrees, again no improvement compared to 45, I don't get it.

 

[D_W]

Bevel up without a cap iron is more of a marketing gimmick. They have lever cap pressing closer to the edge, in place of the cap iron.
The chip "breaking" thing works with "difficult" wood if the cap iron is very close - making the plane perform a bit more like a scraper. But a scraper does it better!

A scraper is like racing with a sloth compared to using a plane with the cap iron set. Very occasionally, you'll run across wood that can't be finished by something like french polish without scraping or sanding, but it's still better to plane as well as possible (much faster) to the point before scraping and sanding, and the shape looks much more crisp if the sanding and scraping is minimized.

Back to the stanley patent, because that's brought up all the time. Stanley can't patent the function of the cap iron - it predated the stanley plane by at least 100 years. the function of creating a mini hump was novel and new, but the function of the cap isn't.

Relying on a patent and drawing a false conclusion is an example of the systemic problem on a forum that is how pleasant it is for a lot of people to argue about things they don't have much experience with - by choice. It takes less than a week to learn to use a cap iron properly as long as you have decent eyesight. If you don't, then maybe it becomes a little bit more difficult. You end up retracing history if you actually learn to use it properly.

 

[Jacob]

putting in a 5 degree difference from 45 to 50 on the cap iron edge isn't going to change your life, I tried it and it did nothing at all, no improvement, also tried 55 degrees, again no improvement compared to 45, I don't get it.

Never occurred to me to even bother!
I think the tool fiddlers try so many variables that they can't be sure which one is having an effect.
If cap iron geometry is so important then presumably all those capless bevel-up planes don't cut too well? If not why not?
I always set my cap iron at about 1/16" and yes setting it closer does make it more like a scraper but harder work.
Some fastest cutting planes seem to be without cap irons e.g. scrub.

 

[D_W]

putting in a 5 degree difference from 45 to 50 on the cap iron edge isn't going to change your life, I tried it and it did nothing at all, no improvement, also tried 55 degrees, again no improvement compared to 45, I don't get it.

The ideal shape for a cap iron is rounded and not a flat facet. Stanley's cap iron is pretty close. If you condition the cap iron and hone/polish the leading edge, you end up with a tiny area that's very steep and then a varying angle after that.

I also would not be able to tell much between 50 vs. 55 flat, etc. The difference between a big flat facet at 50 vs. 80 though is drastic, and 80 in a large facet is very undesirable. It's better suited to a machine where the cut depth never changes and there's a jig to set a knife - like the supersurfacer.

We apparently like to make things difficult. To get an ideal setup with a cap iron, you round, hone the edge to clean it up and get it crisp and that's it. Some level of polish where the shaving meets the cap iron is also beneficial. I think I typically spend less than 2 minutes preparing the cap iron on an older wooden plane or double iron set. Same with stanley planes. hone and rotate the bevel of the cap iron a little bit terminating the stroke with relative steepness (subjectively 60 degrees or so, it'll always end up a little more) and then buff off the wire edge that results after thinning it a little bit. A deburring wheel followed by a buffer is also nice because very few cap irons (except some japanese) are fully hardened, and the deburr/buff deals with the wire edge pretty easily. Just don't buff a leading edge enough to round it over and under so that it will trap a shaving.

I tested all of these things A/B (comparing them) on a stanley style plane (a millers falls 9) and on a japanese plane. I found, without reading anything, that the rounded profile worked the best.

A poster on another forum mentioned when I stated that that nicholson says the same thing, which was the first I heard of nicholson. Nicholson's guidance for dimensioning and planing is superb, but it's a little sparse for beginners, I guess. Nicholson is also intention on matching the cap iron to the iron profile (camber) which I haven't seen the benefit to unless the sole follows the camber (like a gutter plane), but there's no harm to it.

when I tested the 80 degree flat wall, the cap iron becomes very difficult to set - going from being ineffective to too much resistance in a short span. The original supersurfacer video showed some preference for that, but the supersurfacer machines come with a precise setting jig so it doesn't matter if it's hard to set. The jig nails it. The university who did the study also stated flatly that the video was for a planing machine and not for hand tools - they released a separate paper for setting hand tools and it's kind of wishy washy and short. In that, they just more or less said that a shaving that shortens shows when the cap iron is set properly. I think they wanted to be able to provide something paint by number in setting the cap looking at it rather than observing the influence. a "shorter" shaving is their term for one that's become straight or is not curled because the action of the cap iron that straightens the shaving is compression and when someone sent me that paper, I was surprised (and confused) to see what they meant by the shaving being shorter. To say that the shaving straightens or parts of it will straighten once the cap iron is compressing the shavings would've been easier to understand, but the shavings are actually shorter if you measure them.





They do not actually need to be straight for tearout mitigation to occur and as time goes on, the more wood you dimension, the more you'll favor as little as possible - some observation of that the shaving is straightening if the shaving stays continuous.

Accurate and efficient dimensioning can't be had if there's significant tearout discontinuous shavings - once you get past jack work if you have a surface like that, you just create a huge series of intermittent cuts. Intermittent cuts dull an iron faster and require a series of starting and stopping. It's easier to stay in a cut than it is to initiate one. Not to mention, if you have some % of tearout even starting on a flat surface, you're already removing that % less from the start.

So, what's better about the very initial part of the cap being rounded instead of flat? you get better performance in terms of planing effort as you increase shaving thickness. As in, the same amount of tearout control can be had with less resistance.

If I just absolutely wasn't comfortable with rounding the tip, 50 to 60 degrees or so would be my choice for a flat facet and don't make the flat facet any bigger than it needs to be to control tearout. Making it taller just increases resistance on thicker shavings.

 

[Jacob]

.....

Nobody can have a serious discussion about anything if someone claims to be very knowledgable about the cap iron and then claim that its purpose was other than improving the action of planing.
.......

Nobody said that.
It improves planing by pinning the blade edge tight against the mouth/frog, making it more rigid and less likely to chatter.
It also makes it easier to sharpen as thinner blades are possible. Much like the Gillette safety razor. Which came first?

 

[D_W]

There's little or no demand for them for the most part (or any fine furniture) . You can pick up excellent Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian furniture of varying quality to suit your needs for relatively little. You'd struggle to buy the hardware and some of the timber, let alone turn the lights on. There are studio quality furniture makers like Marc Fish. I have a deep respect for his work and those like him but I can't imagine there are many.

Something like a Windsor style chair maker might make a go of it I suppose. Most cabinet makers near us make their money from custom kitchens and built-ins. The last one I spoke to couldn't remember the last time they made a free standing piece, another stopped as he was, for the most part making general joinery. He was previously and engineering guy and now looks after niche motorcycles.

The same is true here. I've admired some of your built in work - it's clean and crisp and has just the right amount of fancy in context.

I marvel at folks like george, but not everything needs to be 18th century furniture to be desirable. My house is full. When I started reading forums, it seemed like the only thing the trolls wanted to regard as "real work" was furniture. Anything else supposedly wasn't real making, but you hit the nail on the head - the average person who hasn't smoothed over the few clients willing to pay for furniture could make very fine furniture and never recover the cost of materials in it.

bottom and top pieces that are nicely made here in the states often show up on facebook market place for a few hundred to barely four figures. which is probably why the folks who think of themselves as fine furniture makers here are often so frustrated and nasty.

As far as cabinets go - when the economy was booming here, I knew two people who were making custom cabinetry in a small shop. One of the guys died, and the other is an installer now and doesn't make any cabinets. He told me that his minimum daily rate as an installer is $500 and the work is easy to get.

I met a guy here through raffo on these forums - sort of, at least - who was a professional furniture builder, but when I talked to him, he said almost all of his work was veneer on substrate - and his use of hand tools was generally limited to cleaning things up. Including dovetails - I mentioned to him that I thought that even if everyone is mostly power tools, people do at least want to use chisels to cut dovetails and he said "well, or to clean up machine cut dovetails".

I get so belligerent about hand dimensioning because it's not that hard to do, it's not that physically difficult if done right, but there are a bunch of little things where the difference between easy and nitpicky or tedious is very small. the productivity rate in doing those things right could be double or triple and most of the advice is bad. Paul Sellers, Rob Cosman and the late DC gave bad advice about dimensioning, but it's not because they have sinister intentions. it's lack of experience, and realistically, there's no market for it.

Warren Mickley is the lone person I know who is working in a shop without power tools, but he is a specialist and as far as I know, not making complete furniture from start to finish. I think he has so may specialized complementary skills that allow him to do work to help powered shops that he'll always find work, but what he's doing is beyond the scope of a hobby woodworker.

 

[D_W]

Never occurred to me to even bother!
I think the tool fiddlers try so many variables that they can't be sure which one is having an effect.
If cap iron geometry is so important then presumably all those capless bevel-up planes don't cut too well? If not why not?
I always set my cap iron at about 1/16" and yes setting it closer does make it more like a scraper but harder work.
Some fastest cutting planes seem to be without cap irons e.g. scrub.

Imagine if you were actually going to do a bunch of work by hand, and not just talk about it.....

If you suddenly figured out how a cap worked and you realized the effort it saves between the coarse work and fine smoothing, you'd probably be willing to spend half an hour to try a couple of different profiles because figuring out what works better would return the effort 100 fold.

if you're feeding most things through machine thicknessers and moulding profilers, then maybe it won't. I experimented with several profiles to see which one worked best. Out of courtesy, I wrote at the time what I found, but I'd encourage other people to try if they are serious because the feel and results will leave a much bigger impression than just pondering or reading.

I later started making planes and suddenly it seemed to be just as important for the dozen and a half or so planes that I gave to others (or sold for the cost of materials) to make sure that whatever I made wouldn't be outdone by anything else. So, I observed further what the different shapes of older caps felt like in actual work when I bought a few planes to examine and look at how the internals were shaped and where the clearance is.

I also wrote about that out of courtesy.

The amount of actual paying attention that most of the gurus do before they make a flat comment and insist on it (like modern flat cap irons being better than any vintage types) is pretty minimal. In a lot of cases, that's driven by not figuring out why things were the way they were, concluding something with one or two examples of experience, and ultimately preferring if teaching students, to recommend something new because it prevents students from bogging you down asking how to fix something that's damaged and they don't know it's damaged.

To make a case that you couldn't spend a half hour or an hour finding out what cap iron profile works easier for the same benefit and then spend the next however many years planing several thousand board feet makes no sense at all.

 

[D_W]

Nothing to do with rigidity Jacob, it was just a marketing gimmick

Stanley had to find something to patent - the cap iron action was well documented in print in various places, so he couldn't patent the function of it breaking chips. But he could patent the function of the hump so that nobody could immediately copy the design. It's pretty novel from the aspect that it halves the amount of steel needed for the cap iron and the spring exists only in a short part of the cap.

It probably allowed for a thinner iron as a ward cap or something of the sort would really bend a thin iron into a garish looking setup.

Ward and Mathieson and anyone carefully copying their design pretty much had the ideal cap iron to go with wooden planes, though - the primary bevel of the cap is fairly long and the rounded part at the end is short - it makes a big difference in planing effort and plane clearance vs. some of the earlier fatter caps, and especially vs. some of the cheaply made cap irons now. Some of the early butcher cap irons look really nice, but the rounding is tall and it's pretty easy to see why later fine makers lowered the cap. It would've mattered when it affected shop productivity.

A good example of a later cap is the ECE design. The chinese maker woodwell (mujingfang) copied these.

https://www.fine-tools.com/hobele.html
They are incompatible with older planes, have too much spring under the cap (adjustment with a wedge is really poor - the irons don't adjust for depth well, which I guess pushes people toward the bizarre primus device), and the blunt face is solved in those planes by cutting the mortise bigger and removing the plane wear. It must be easier to make the cap design like that since the leading edge can just be milled.

But I'm fairly sure that bailey patented the hump on the cap iron to protect it from being copied, possibly for function purposes but also for differentiation.

 

[Ttrees]

putting in a 5 degree difference from 45 to 50 on the cap iron edge isn't going to change your life, I tried it and it did nothing at all, no improvement, also tried 55 degrees, again no improvement compared to 45, I don't get it.

It did nothing for me the first time I tried either, as I had my frog adjusted forward
which stops the effect from working.

However one who "paints by numbers" and uses a flat bevel on their cap iron, (more than likely) will indeed agree that 50 degrees is about the lowest you can go when you still want some camber, as on a smoother for instance, will need the cap iron to be very close, possibly too close on some extremely dense species,
and this is where folks are getting the impression that it works like a scraper,
although we can see it is certainly not the case when we can see thick and straight shavings.

The notable change between 45 and 50 or a hair above (in this "paint by numbers", i.e flat bevel case) will make the difference regarding the mouth setting, as it cannot be set close enough if the mouth is tight
(without other work on the wear, which is of no benefit here, and dare I say seemingly an impediment for panel plane work, should one want thick shavings and not wispy ones.)

So dependent on whether you regard material selection or whatever as a life changing occurrence, is debatable,
Many arguments could be made, take Graham's table for example
A piece like that could be a stepping stone into a livelyhood of commissions

My personal case was that I was getting reactions from tearing out chunks whilst not planing tropical timbers very well, really sweating trying to scrape down to the bottom of the pocks, compared to working cleanly now, with less effort planing, not to even mention scraping as that's for doors and curves, and it ain't fun !

And nearly forgot longevity of the edge which is huge matter also,
I could only plane a stick of some of my densest iroko before the edge failed.
Not the case anymore, as I'm not slamming into knots or reversing grain now.

And another point about that is the cap iron will still work on an edge which needs refreshing.
If one needs an uber sharp iron to eliminate tearout on hardwoods anyway, then that's suggesting not enough influence of the cap is happening.

 

[D_W]

Your description is what drove me to figure it out. all of the videos that followed and the text references since then back to older texts weren't generally discussed on forums, but I hated working with mediocre machines and resolved to work by hand.

I made a 55 degree infill smoother, a panel plane and bought a very good quality early 1800s single iron jointer.

It was terrible. They were all single iron. planes. The worst part was the middle work trying to get from rough work to being ready for smoothing without blowing past a mark, and it felt like walking on ice. Along with gluing a panel together that looked good but varied in grain direction.

The thing that weighed on me the most in figuring that it must work was Todd Hughes talking about how much more effort it was for a blacksmith to make a double iron than a single iron and he was heckling larry williams about it a little bit (todd did professional blacksmithing work and bought and sold tools and all kinds of other things). The economic argument was the one I couldn't deny. Nothing economically senseless lasts over time.

I couldn't tell at the time if Warren Mickley was a troll - I thought he might be, but what he said seemed to be credible enough and he torched people at the woodworking shows here in skills challenges like cutting tenons for speed and accuracy, because he actually does it. He also beat everyone in a contest to smooth a given piece of stock the fastest using a bevel up plane, something he doesn't even use.

At any rate, it took a week to make a cap iron millers falls smoother more capable than the infill that I have (still have it) because I had the luxury of actually working on a relatively large bookcase from rough to finish and could get some hours put in planing with the various planes. It only took a week to get setting the cap iron down to about 15 seconds and that was the end of using single iron bench planes.

I still have a 17th century jack and that jointer mentioned above to go back to time to time, and I still have the infill. They're fun to play with if you're not actually working on typical lumber and trying to get anything done. Steve Voigt reminded me at one point when I mentioned how stark the difference is that I guess finding really straight lumber (the miller took it upon themselves to cater to the buyer and the quality of sawing was better) was easier, and finding large clear softwood lumber was a lot more common.

I met Warren earlier this year - he came to my house and we worked through the bears of the day in my shop - he's honest and he does what he says he does. I also let him use my norris 13 panel plane - it's a real boat anchor weight wise, but I will make a copy of it dovetailed with less weight at some point.

This is such a draw - this subject - to me, because you can buy expensive wood that's not dead straight and just plane it like it's exercise and the worst you'll have to do is very minimal scraping and/or sanding. And you can plane a case that's assembled without any fear.

I miscalculated how many people would actually like to dimension well, how many have and how many do. I no longer believe anyone does much bench work entirely by hand if they don't go screaming to solve the issue of tearout in regular middle work - it's too aggravating to avoid.

(my infill smoother is 55 degrees and the mouth is 3-4 thousandths. I thought I was really set up for the long haul after making it. you can't really create any significant damage with it. The infill panel plane I made was 48 degree bed with a 1 hundredth mouth. The ability to have good control over tearout goes away somewhere between 3-4 thousandths and 1 hundredth of an inch. The infill plane on glued panels was intolerable. It had a cap iron but I didn't know to file the mouth on it the way norris and others do with their planes to allow the cap to be advanced all the way to the edge - I did that later, and it was 10x the plane that it had been originally but I sold it for other reasons that have to do with kit components that came with it and bought an older panel plane).

 

[D_W]

I have to make one more plug for Bill Tindall and Steve Elliot.

when I posted all of this stuff on wood central originally, I got some derision, warren was, I think, celebratory.

...and maybe a week later, bill sent me an email. in it was a link to a japanese server, and he said "I have something I think you will be interested in seeing".

it was the K&K video that everyone is used to seeing now, but before it was ever publicly posted. Bill and Steve went to the trouble of actually finding the university who did the study, getting connected to the professor, using I don't know who to communicate (Mia Iwasaki?) and eventually worked out the rights to sharing the video and getting help (I think from Mia, to translate the papers to English).

if they had not done that, nobody would have ever seen it, and nobody would have the documentation.

I watched the video and told Bill I didn't like 80 degrees in a hand plane even though the video recommended it, and the difference of a big 80 degree bevel vs. something more like 50 was too stark for me to be wrong about it, and he got back to me and said that the paper itself was clear that the study was for the supersurfacer function and not for hand tools - it took a long time before the hand tool version was translated, and it's really short.

Before releasing the article on wood central, I looked for anyone talking about a cap iron in use - ever, and the only accurate discussion was two people on here that I can recall around 2005 -someone from Finland, and I can't remember them. Maybe they said it twice. And warren. Bob Strawn was also experimenting with one on another forum around 2012 - not sure where that ended up. Well, and Warren. Warren is good at describing generalities and leaving you with something to figure out yourself, but the forum users aren't very good at actually going and figuring out much.

Anyone else since then who has pointed out old texts and claimed they already knew the stuff, I don't believe it. I think most of the big run-up in talk about hand tools that occurred from the early 2000s until about 6 or 8 years ago was mostly fueled by magazines and LV and LN introducing new tools.

 

[Ttrees]

@D_W Nice to read that Warren had visited you, sounded like fun time all round was had.

Regarding dimensioning by hand for hobbyists, say taking this forum for example,
I'm guessing logistics might be one of the biggest reasoning regarding things here.

Perhaps most in the USA can afford the space of some large iron, you've likely got a huge supply installed already, so some reasoning for skipping the basics there,
compared to here even a decent bench might seem outlandish around these waters and not a workmate and lunchbox P/T tucked into a floating shed
which seems the way most approach things in UK or Eire.
Seems most folk who work in their back garden with such a setup with aims to make furniture aspire to selling everything and making a huge investment at some stage
and make do with what they have.
I've seen the same when buying machines, and half the old workshop clutter which they've had for 30 years, like bits of undersized ducting or whatever is still there.

 

[Ttrees]

@D_W Funny you mention adjusting the cap for not quite straight shavings, until the consistency comes into play.
I suppose that is the effect I choose, even though I'd say I've gotten used to a bit less camber.
Having once honed my 5 1/2's cap to 70 degrees, I can say it wasn't off the bat apparent that I'd have a choice other than straight shavings straight away, with a really abrupt depth adjustment of the plane.
(whether the plane was having more downforce and this is what I noticed I cannot remember, only that I didn't like for the little play I had for a half hour, should'a spent another half hour and thought about it, i.e backed the cap to as far as I could.
Nearly sounds like that setting the depth of the plane is also more forgiving with a rounded, or smaller "2paint by numbers" bevel?

Cheers
Tom

 

[D_W]

There are probably more working on workmates and small mail order benches than would admit it here.

I haven't got a great suggestion for that as a bench that moves is really an annoying problem if working entirely by hand. If I still had a smaller bench (started with a sjoberg's entry level bench until I broke the vises a while ago. I boxed the bottom with plywood to make it more rigid and then filled the lower area with ballast).

At any rate, I would try to affix a very light bench somewhere with a solid connection to a wall. Like two boards attached under to a side wall and one attached out of the end of the bench to a wall 90 degrees from there.

I have an old machinists bench (wood, bulky, heavy, not very useful other than its weight) that the prior homeowner left here. I pushed the sjoberg's bench up against it so that it couldn't move.

I'm not sure how much space it takes to work by and, but you do have to be able to have the bench and then move easily. It's not difficult to learn to plane with both hands pretty well, but a lack of open space can be a real problem if you're making furniture.

The typical power tool shop here is mostly neatly laid out (typical meaning someone willing to lay out serious cash) and assembly and storage is elsewhere or there's a large assembly table. I have too many things going in my work area now (metalwork, a whole bunch of space occupied by guitar templates and supplies and guitar wood, and of course woodworking) and would like more open space, but still have a car's worth of open space. More is better. If space is really small, it's not so much the bench work that seems a problem, but staging and assembly and having enough lumber on hand would be a real problem.

The magazine style huge workspace thing, as far as I can tell, is mostly a post mid 1990s thing. I knew several woodworkers as a kid. they had portable planers, a contractor saw and a small work space. there were people of greater means, I'm sure, but now it's a middle class thing. I think the marketing must've been really effective.

Last comment - large benches are common here, too, but almost to a T, every one I've seen in person is pretty much spotless at least for my standards. It's really hard to do heavy work on a bench if it can't get dirty or dented.