beading is also something I'd like to try as well. I plan on making drawer bottoms, grooves for sliding lid boxes of different sizes
From a practical, maker's point of view there's a hierarchy of tools for beading.
At the very top for furniture making is a beading plane in the form of a traditional moulder, i.e. with a wooden stock. The combination of the sole and the 50 or, better still, 55 degree pitch will give you the best results on hardwood, no tear out and a beautifully burnished finish. The downside is that for every good old one there are several poor ones that need a lot of work and quite a few that are past redemption. Quality new ones, i.e. from Philly Planes, cost a fair bit of money.
Just below that is a scratch stock with a well made cutter. It has the advantage that you can work in either direction to deal with wayward grain and you can size it precisely for your specific needs. The downside is that making and maintaining cutters takes a bit of effort and with most designs of scratch stock there is no depth stop, so you have to pay some attention in use, especially if you'll be mitring together different sections and you want them to line up. Scratch stocks don't work that well on softwoods, but on hardwoods they're very acceptable for even first class work.
At the bottom are beads formed with multi-planes/plough planes. These are generally at a 45 degree pitch and have no sole. With carefully selected, straight grained softwoods you can just about get away with it, but the results are rarely all that great.
Incidentally, in my opinion an electric router is about on par with a multi-plane as a beading tool. Prone to scorching and scalloping the results are often poor.
I'm labouring these points because, after following your bench build, you seem to be fairly committed as a maker, for most people it wouldn't matter but you might be aiming that bit higher up the quality scale.
On a similar theme, if you're cutting grooves you really want whatever goes into those grooves to be snug. A rattly fit is just that bit tacky. That has some implications for choosing cutter widths. You'll mainly find MDF in metric widths, ply is nominally sized so is very variable, in practise getting that nice snug fit with sheet goods panels or drawer bottoms often requires either metric cutters or a fractionally undersized cutter followed by a side rebate plane. With solid timber throughout it's less of a problem, you would follow the normal procedure of "make the hole then make the thing that goes into the hole", so you'd cut the groove then size the panel to fit. The one area that might require a special cutter width is drawer bottoms if you're working to the classic English design with slips. In that case you want a drawer bottom that's
precisely twice the groove thickness. Sure, you can chamfer the lower edges of the drawer bottom to fit, but it's more efficient if you can work straight off the tool. For most drawers that means a cutter that's 4mm wide or 5/32", although 3/16" will do at a pinch. Long story but the bottom line is that for drawer making you want a multi plane with a 3/16" cutter, and if you're really fussy you'll want spare cutters to grind down to your favourite dimensions.
Good luck!
