YAWN - Yet Another Workbench Newbie

[MarkDennehy]

So after enough time to use up all the swear words on a Workmate, I figured enough was enough and it was time to buy a workbench.

Then I saw the prices for hand tool friendly workbenches and vigorously revisited that notion, and came across Paul Sellers' videos and the Stumpy Nubs 2x6 Roubo build and all the other builds out there, and like every newbie ever, decided to do something slightly more complicated than was strictly necessary (because hey, it's fun).

This was the initial design:

Originally, I wanted a bench that could - with a chunk of effort - be knocked down for moving because we'd have to move house at some point in the next few years and leaving it behind seemed silly. But the more I looked at the joinery and the compromises and the complexity, the less I liked that idea, so the final design loses the wedges for drawbores. The tool tray still attaches on to the back as a seperate piece because that way I can have the main body of the bench built and use it to build the tool tray. The long complicated sliding dovetail arrangement for the legs got seriously revised thanks to advice from here, the legs still slot into the apron but in a much simpler way - no dovetailing, a much shorter length of joint, and the joint itself is an unglued friction fit rather than being all glued up, so that any expansion in the aprons doesn't try to push the top off the legs.

There's a dado cut in the underside of the bench between legs that the top stretcher will fit into, but again it won't be glued, it'll be a friction fit; the idea is to take some of the stress off the leg's tenons when planing on the bench and absorb that sideways force in the stretchers, but without actually having the top rest on top of the stretchers (my thinking being that the tenons will be drawbored so if the stretchers were just glued into that dado, they'd put stress on the drawbore pin when they expand).

I'm hoping to use the method in the Stumpy Nubs build for the leg tenons and cut them with a saw before glueing the whole laminated top together. The core would get glued up as one chunk; then the leg tenons get cut in the outer boards and everything's fitted and assembled, and then the aprons go on after that. At least, that's the plan...

There'll be a row of bench dog holes and a space for a veritas inset tail vice that can be added later on; I'll have some more holes for holdfasts as well. There will be a planing stop just to the left of the left leg, and a record 53A is sitting here waiting to get attached to the right of that leg. I'm thinking of an inset hardwood face in the outside of the bench for the vice (the inner jaw will be set behind the apron and the outer jaw gets a hardwood face and suede). The tool tray boards are loose so you can remove them and use clamps on the far side of the bench as well. If it turns out to be useful I'll put some dogs in the hardwood face of the record vice and corresponding dog holes in the benchtop in a line towards the back of the bench, but I'll think about that after I get to actually work on the bench for a while.

The whole thing is rather small by most people's standards I guess - about 60" by about 32" (24" of bench plus 8" of tool tray) by 40" tall (the bench height I usually prefer to work at when standing) - but it has to fit into an 8'x6' shed with enough room to reach underneath to the screw on the record 169 plane stop holder on one end and for the handle of the inset tail vice on the other. And I drew up the plans with the intent that they could and would be tweaked and fudged during the build as required because stuff never goes according to plan. It seemed reasonable enough (stop laughing) and I figured I could build it in a week using only hand tools (seriously, stop laughing, you need to breathe).

Then I started hitting the fun speed bumps. Timber yards in Ireland, for example, are... not hen's teeth but aren't far off for newbie amateurs. Okay, but Paul Sellers' bench is made with B&Q timber and the Stumpy Nubs one is the same. Irish B&Q and Woodies prices are... somewhat higher than is pleasant though. Okay, onto the builders merchant website and ordered some RWD timber (I'm not sure if there's different UK terminology, it's the really god-awful pine-ish stuff they eventually turn into the planed god-awful stuff in B&Q). I figured I could save some money getting it rough-sawn and that the handplaning would knock all the it's-so-special glow off the idea of hand tools and convince me to just use power tools for everything forever. Of course I don't have a truck or a trailer, so I have to pay for delivery (you can't fit 4.8m lengths of anything other than rope into a Citroen C4) and that's all the cost savings out the window before I've even clicked on "Pay now". But sod it, needs must. It would have nice if the delivery man hadn't dumped it all into my neighbour's parking spot mind you...

And okay, most of the work's going to be done with hand tools, but for the initial rough cuts to get the timber down to a stage where I could store it in my shed while waiting for it to warp, cup and twist, I just ran it through the mitre saw.

I need a larger back yard. But, it got it done. Stacked and stickered the wood in the shed to let it acclimatise for a week or three.

 

[monkeybiter]

You should write comedy, very entertaining write-up.
Good design change decisions, I would think that by the time you move house you will be ready to build a new bench based on your accumulated experience, so I wouldn't worry too much about future proofing this one.
Watching keenly.

 

[MarkDennehy]

There follows a few weeks of waiting and gathering up a few tools I didn't have and was going to need (yes, I need a #7. For a given value of need. Oh come on, look at all that lovely cast iron...).
Then after that, once the moisture content was more or less stable in the wood, I hauled out the 2x3 lengths I had and knocked up some quick sawhorses because I was not about to plane an entire workbench on a workmate that did more dancing than I did at my wedding.

Nothing fancy, but so much damn nicer than planing on the workmate. Next up, planing the glue faces of the leg pieces.

I'd taken a week's holidays (mainly because work had been a bit insane for the previous few months and I needed either downtime or valium and the holiday was cheaper), and the idea was to do all this during that week. I spent most of the first day grinding and sharpening a few dozen plane blades and chisel blades and other prep stuff and the legs were day two.

Glue-up was done for all four legs at once (I do love those cast iron clamps).

The next morning, I undid the clamps, everything looked grand, I cleaned up the outside faces with the #4½ but didn't bother making them square yet, and put them back in the shed, planning to start on the top after lunch.


And then the heavens opened and the rest of the day was spent watching rain from indoors.
And then it rained all the next day. And the next. And for the rest of the week. By Sunday I was about ready to spit. An entire week with nothing done. Fudge.
And then the next few weekends were either taken up with family stuff or rained out as well. By this point, I was starting to think the weather had it in for me...

 

[MarkDennehy]

I managed, one or three boards at a time, to get the glue faces of the benchtop boards planed smoothish (from rough-sawn) over assorted weekday evenings in the hour or less that I had free. Hell, I even managed to paint the sawhorses out of sheer frustration (and to test the colours of the paint intended for the shed).

Then this weekend I finally got a sunday to work on the top (I was waiting for a full day because everyone says that with pine, plane it flat and glue it the same day or it'll warp on you out of spite). Out came the boards...

Got all the grains lined up to help with planing later on, picked out the most awful looking boards for the back of the bench - if I can arrange for the lighting in the shed to be bad enough I won't even see the knots - and then clamped everything to see where the worst gaps were. Noted them on the boards and then started working through the boards a pair at a time, holding them together with hand pressure, noting the high points on the glue faces, planing them down, re-holding them, swearing, planing some more, rechecking, reswearing... you get the idea. Eventually I got it to the point where the gaps in any pair of boards was eliminated under hand pressure and the clamps eliminated them over the whole top.

That's not the entire top of course, it's just the core - there are four more boards, two which will have the mortice for the leg tenons cut in them and two which will be the top apron boards. They'll get added on later.

One more dry rehearsal and then out with the titebond. And all of the clamps.

Seriously, I know you can't ever have enough clamps, but I'm running out of wood to put the clamps on.
I did initially put the two ends into cauls to keep them as flat as I could while taking up the pressure on the main clamps, and then removed the cauls and added the clamps I had used on those to the main boards. I'll probably wind up regretting that at some point but the RWD wood not being planed meant all the 2x4s weren't 2x4s; they were 2x4s, 2x3.9s, 2x4.1s and so on, so I was never going to get away from lots of planing to flatten the top. Might as well just accept that now I guess.

Besides, tidying up the mess from the squeeze-out is going to be the more painful part...

Still though, good squeeze-out top and bottom. That's good. Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself repeatedly while wondering where a full litre of titebond went to.

And then I threw a tarp over the whole thing and five minutes later the heavens opened, again. And we're forecast for a week of rain. Bloody Irish summer weather. I'll take off the clamps in a few days, see how bad the result is. Oh matron, the suspense!

 

[MattRoberts]

Great progress, thanks for sharing and giving us a good chuckle!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

As said above - if you can simplify, so much the better. It's your first bench and ultimately it will be wrong. You'll look at it after a year or so and think I wish I'd made that narrower, thinner, thicker, wider ... I wish it was higher, lower ... I wish I hadn't glued that and screwed it instead ... I wish I'd made so the top can come off ... You'll have done a lot of work for nothing. I did my second base last year (I kept the top) and sometimes I still think I could have something a little differently. One observation I would make is that I would end the apron at the legs - I've always found unrestricted access to ends handy. You could do that afterwards, of course (but that's a suggestion from someone who doesn't like aprons at all).

 

[dzj]

There's a dado cut in the underside of the bench between legs that the top stretcher will fit into, but again it won't be glued, it'll be a friction fit; the idea is to
take some of the stress off the leg's tenons when planing on the bench and absorb that sideways force in the stretchers, but without actually having the top
rest on top of the stretchers (my thinking being that the tenons will be drawbored so if the stretchers were just glued into that dado,
they'd put stress on the drawbore pin when they expand).

An interesting design. A kind of Roubo/ Nicholson crossbreed.
Although I don't see why you didn't throw out the top stretcher completely.
With a benchtop that thick it serves no purpose and the expanding top will put unnecessary strain on the pinned tenons
(even with the stretcher not being glued into the housing)

 

[MarkDennehy]

An interesting design. A kind of Roubo/ Nicholson crossbreed.

Doesn't every newbie have to do that? Take a solid, simple working design and overcomplicate it so they can learn how bad an idea that is?

Although I don't see why you didn't throw out the top stretcher completely.
With a benchtop that thick it serves no purpose and the expanding top will put unnecessary strain on the pinned tenons
(even with the stretcher not being glued into the housing)

The thinking was that the bench is a box, made up from the four legs on the vertical edges, the four stretchers on the bottom as the bottom edges, the aprons as the two long upper edges, and then the stretchers as the two top short edges.
And that we need the top short stretchers because otherwise all the stress they take up when you push the bench from the face vice side towards the back would be taken up by the leg tenons; and since the shoulders of those tenons have to
be large - they take the full weight of the bench onto the legs - the tenons won't be 2x4 in section. So the stretchers have the bulk to take that force in compression and cut down on the shear forces on the tenons.

The thinking may have been the result of a blank sheet of paper, a year or two of structural engineering, and several beers however...

 

[MarkDennehy]

So today I was a bit under the weather (which is a polite way of saying that I was having a philosophical dispute with something I ate and was conducting a brexit poll of my own) and working from home (which is a polite way of saying that if you work in IT, being confined to where the king goes alone is not enough to get you out of work because we invented both the laptop and wifi). So over lunch I took the clamps off the core of the benchtop glueup to see would it immediately fall apart (because as we all know, a litre of titebond II regularly fails to hold wood together). Happily, the glue held the wood together. Slightly less happily, the glue also held some of the clamping blocks to the bench, but a few wallops with a mallet convinced them of the error of their ways.
Then I lifted the top onto the sawhorses to get a good look at it. Pro tip: if you have a dodgy tummy, don't try to pick up a freshly-glued up benchtop and use your core abdominal muscles to pivot it to put it on sawhorses.
So a half-hour or so later and somewhat lighter, I went back to take a look at the benchtop, gave it a pass or two with a scrub plane to clean off the glue and let me see how bad it was and it's... well, it's not as bad as I was worried it might be.

The ends are aligned to within a millimeter or so on the far end, and only out by a few millimeters on this end, and I still have to cut somewhere around 100mm off the overall length anyway, so that's grand. There are still one or two small gaps at what will be the the far back right of the benchtop when it's done, almost a half-millimetre wide, but I can live with that. The area to the front where most of the work gets done is absolutely fine.

There is, however, a minor issue that I mentioned last time. This stuff is all rough white deal, and instead of being 2"x4", it's everything from 1.8"x3.9" to 2"x4" to 2.2"xScrewYouBuddy, so there wasn't any way to clamp it to give me a flat face.

Hooooooooboy...
I'm going to have to refettle my scrub plane I think (well, it is a POS £10 #4)

I'm also probably going to drill out that huge knot in the fourth board from the left and call it a holdfast hole. Instead of a goddamnit-why-wasn't-I-wearing-my-safety-glasses-I've-just-sprayed-myself-in-the-eyes-with-pine-knot-splinters-screw-you-knot-I'm-getting-rid-of-you hole, which is what it really will be.

 

[MattRoberts]

Nice progress! Do you have a router? You could either spend a day with a full set of planes to flatten that top, or you could spend a couple of hours with a router and flattening sled. I know which I'd prefer!

 

[MarkDennehy]

I do Matt, I have a bosch one (one of the green 1200w ones), but I'm going to use the planes instead. It'll take longer and I'll learn more swear words, but I'm still slightly wary of a tool that can remove all my fingers faster than I can turn it off I'll be a lot happier using that thing when I have it bolted into that Aldi router table and I can safely run away from it.

Also, I might have accidentally bought a #6 today (common accident, can happen to anyone, you just slip on the soap in the shower and fall onto your laptop and accidentally click bid on ebay) so if I don't start using them a lot more, questions might get asked...

 

[MattRoberts]

More power to you. I'll reserve my 'I told you so' until you've posted the next update with your blistered and bloody fingers

 

[MarkDennehy]

Heck, if my blistered and bloody fingers are all you're waiting for, you should post away now Turns out all my calluses are in the wrong places from using chef's knives, garden spades, rifles, soldering irons and other non-woodworking-tool-things, and I'm now having to grow a new set. Which is fun.

 

[DTR]

More power to you. I'll reserve my 'I told you so' until you've posted the next update with your blistered and bloody fingers

I hand-planed 1/4" of twist out of my 7' ash bench top, it's not that bad

Good luck with the bench build, Mark

 

[MattRoberts]

I think it's more my fear of hand planing. Whenever I do it, I just seem to tear large chunks out of the wood

 

[Adam9453]

great build thread, very amusing.

A little tip i picked up some where, if you use scraps of greaseproof paper between your clamps and the wood, the glue doesn't stick them together. I think it was a veneering tip but it applies universally.

I'm looking forward to the next instalment

 

[Roughcut]

I think it's more my fear of hand planing. Whenever I do it, I just seem to tear large chunks out of the wood

Yeah that can happen if the timber is laminated together without thought given to the right grain orientation.
Don't ask me how I know this.

 

[Grawschbags]

Loving the thread, following with interest...

I'm about to undertake a similar project. Picked up all my wood this afternoon, cut it to length with a circular saw at the timber yard, and shoved it in the boot.

Do you mind telling me what the different clamps are and where from?

Clamps are the next thing on my list!

 

[MarkDennehy]

Three kinds of clamps Grawschbags: two kinds of sash clamps, the big-ass 1200mm cast iron T-bar clamps which cost £124 (for eight) from midlands tools on ebay, and the smaller 600mm as-seen-on-the-paul-sellers-show aluminium sash clamps which cost £68 (for eight) from ppretail on ebay - but try aliexpress.com for those as well because I'm pretty sure they're all coming off the same chinese extrusion works - and I got a few of the aldi clamps as well but they're only 450mm so they're not long enough for the larger glue-ups, but I had another one bought from woodies ages ago that gets occasional use (mostly though, they're just used for quickly clamping something I'm working on to the sawhorses, and they're damn useful for that).

If I was doing it over, I'm not 100% certain I'd get eight of the t-bar clamps. They're way better in terms of clamping pressure than the aluminium ones, which I still need to stuff with wood, but they're quite expensive, bloody heavy and awkward as well. I'd see them mainly being used for clamping carcasses of larger bits and pieces in the future, I think the smaller aluminium ones are more likely to be used more often to be honest. That said, now that I have them, I'm not sorry either, it gives you a bit more confidence when setting up the glue-up and besides, you just know that if you only had four of them you'd run into that one job that needs five...

 

[Grawschbags]

Three kinds of clamps Grawschbags...

Thanks for the detailed reply mate.

I had read a fair bit on here about the t-bar clamps being awesome, but unwieldy like you say. I think I would only use t-bar clamps for the bench tops, not for any future work...

I like the idea of the aluminium sash clamps. I've also seen Paul Sellers stuff them with wood. Probably got some wood in the garage that will do the job. Probably much more useable for me in future as well. Good to hear your thoughts that t-bars may not really be necessary.

Must have watched the Paul Sellers YouTube series on building a workbench about 4 times, so should really go and crack on rather than just talking about it...