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With the benchtop nearly complete, I had some serious decisions to make.  Actually, only one: square dog holes or round?

While there are pros and cons to each, I finally decided on square dogs for a few reasons:

• Round dogs need to have some sort of spring device – be it a piece of metal, a ball bearing, or something else to prevent the rod from falling through the dog hole.  Eventually, this spring wears grooves in the dog holes and results in a less-than-tight fit.  Score one for square dogs.
• Square dogs have flat faces, and there is no need to worry about turning inside the dog hole.  In addition, I have plenty of scrap maple laying around which will make for some nice dogs.  Point #2 for the square holes.
• Aesthetically, the square dog holes are more prevalent in older (read, hundred-year-old) benches.  I kind of like this aspect, though it doesn’t fall into a functionality argument.  Final decision: square dogs.

Knowing that a Benchcrafted tail vise was on the way, and it should allow me at least 10-11″ of travel, I decided that I didn’t need a dog hole every 2-3 inches as some do on their benches.  I will be using legs that are 5″ square, and don’t really want to have a dog hole fall over a leg, so this means somewhere in the range of a 6″ minimum spacing between holes.  I actually figured out a good spacing on this, but don’t have that information available at this time – this post is probably 6 months after the operation took place.  I do remember that the first dog hole is approximately 3″ from the end of the vise cavity, then every 6″ (or so) from that point.  I made a template from 1/2″ MDF and scrap red oak which angled toward the vise at approximately 1-2 degrees off vertical, and used a 5/8″ template cutting router bit to create the cavities:

After making all sorts of noise and dust, I ended up with a completed strip:

My goal was a 1 3/4″ wide dog strip.  Each dog hole cavity was 1″ deep, and the SYP you see above was planed to 1 3/8″.  A mating piece which was planed to 3/8″ was glued to the top, the dog hole cavities filled on all sides with blue painters tape, and the gluing and clamping process continued.

As you can tell, there is about 10 pounds of glue which will eventually need to be planed off.  Nobody can ever say that I was stingy with the stuff; over a gallon was used on the top alone.

Coming up: initial flattening, front laminations, end cap, vise, and legs…

-P

Laminating the sections of the top was a royal pain.  I had 4 smaller laminations of 5 boards each, which had to be face jointed and mated perfectly for strong glue joints.  This was where I really got an introduction to the jack and jointer planes, and where I also had the opportunity to make (and subsequently correct) plenty of mistakes.

Even though you would think that laminating five planks of pretty-straight southern yellow pine would give a pretty-straight face – it wasn’t the case for me.  The smaller laminations were almost universally bowed to some extent, requiring using the planes in an effort to flatten them for final glue-up.  Having no previous experience with this operation, and a head full of booksmarts on the process, I set out to prepare the sections.  Inevitably, this resulted in one outer board shrinking from 1 1/4″ thick down to as little as 3/4″ on each section – which translated to a fairly significant reduction in overall width of the bench.

Not wanting to laminate 20+ boards at once – mainly due to lack of confidence in my ability to finish within the 15-minute working time of the Titebond III – I thought the “smaller section method” would be the best way to go.  Looking back, I believe it would have been easier and probably given better results to have directly laminated a few boards at a time to an initial glue-up of, say, five boards.  Impatience probably got the best of me here; I don’t know.  But, yeah, if there’s ever a next time, I will glue up five or so, then add more directly to that initial lamination.

By the time all was said and done, I had a finished top that was nearly the required dimension.  I know that the typical sliding rules are the work of the devil, but measuring with a metric rule shows that there is probably a 1 or 2 mm difference in the width of the top over the entire 8′ length.  Not perfect, but certainly not terrible.  I can live with it.

It was sometime during this process that I decided to look into vises.  I was really attracted to the ‘wagon vise’ – a sliding dog block mortised into the top of the bench which allows work to be held a variety of ways.  Trying to engineer the setup in my mind was getting tiring until I read about the Benchcrafted Tail Vise.  An order was placed and preparations were made in ensuring the top would accommodate this device and remain within spec.  Thus, I ended up with three small laminated sections to glue up, a “correction” board of 1 1/4″ to make up for lost width which had a mortise routed into it for a planing stop, and another small lamination of 2 1/2″ thick to mate for the completion of the planing stop.

Time consuming, yes – but things were progressing.  Remaining are the dog strip, end cap, front lamination, legs, stretchers, and a bottom shelf.  Near this point work came to a near-standstill as we began tiling the house.  This was a grueling 4 months which I will never repeat – but that’s another story!

Best Regards,
-P

Once I decided that the new bench would be the Roubo-inspired design from Mr. Schwarz’s book, I took time to map out what would be required.  Living in Florida, Southern Yellow Pine is cheap and easy to come by – so the wood species was a no-brainer.  A 4″ top sounded stout enough for anything I could throw at it, and I knew I wanted a full 8′ bench which was as close to 24″ wide as I could make it.  Numerous trips to home centers later, I had enough pieces of 2×10 SYP to start ripping into 4 1/8″ wide pieces to be glued.  I left these in the garage for 1-2 weeks to acclimate (the moisture meter actually showed that they were pretty close upon arriving at home – so I figured minimum of a week would be good enough to get started).  My garage is not climate controlled in any way, which means that summer temperatures of 90+ degrees and 80-90% humidity will take the life out of anything – including pine – in very short order.

Even getting to this point was tedious – I had to build a set of infeed/outfeed tables for the table saw, move things around in the garage to make room for the cut wood, and do all sorts of other non-enjoyable things just to get started.  The final place for the bench will in dead-smack in the middle of the garage, where I can move the bikes out and have plenty of room to work on all sides of the project at hand.

Rather than glue up the entire top at once, I calculated that four sets of 5 boards which were planed to 1 1/4″ would give me a width of 25″.  Fortunately, I have learned the foolhardy ways of thinking that projects like this can be calculated – my original plan should have been to take things one step at a time to arrive at the destination, but I like to envision the end result.  Mistake #0.  The first lamination went fairly smoothly, except for a minor glue mess.  I’m not sure if I used enough Titebond III, but it should hold just the same.

Lamination number 2 went together as well, but with more glue:

Starting with the second lamination, my method of applying glue changed from “put a bunch into a pan and brush it all over the wood” to “just pour it directly on the wood from the gallon jug and slather it all over the place with a foam brush.”  Interesting point: once Titebond III glues on sealed concrete, a steel floor scraper is very handy to pop it off the surface.  The glue will come right off, along with the concrete sealer.  This means that the “workbench project” will become “the workbench and garage floor re-sealing project.”

Also note the shavings from my first efforts at using a hand plane to ensure the faces of each lamination were flat and ready to be glued.  This was certainly a learning experience; I believe I ended up shaving off nearly 1/4″ of one side before saying that it was “flat enough.”

And… yet, another lamination:

All things considered, things went relatively smoothly up to this point.  Sure, there were plenty of uneven boards which I figured to plane down – but at least progress was being made.  We really get into the learning phase as the pieces come together, though – so keep reading, maybe you will be able to avoid some of the misery that has plagued me!

Best Regards,

-P

My desire for a real, “it doesn’t move,” workbench probably started years ago.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was there.  Each time I would start a new project with my helper (a.k.a. Mom), much of the process inevitably took place on a piece of scrap 3/4″ particleboard resting on a pair of sawhorses.  No matter what I did, there was always some wobbling and the always-present need to have Mom steady the so-called bench while I cut, routed, glued, or performed any other step in the building process.

I actually had a workbench in the garage – actually, it was a ski-tuning bench that I asked my Grandfather to build for me back in the early 1990s.  This was no more than two jointed and edge-glued southern yellow pine 2x12s that he probably found as scrap at a construction site.  What made this unusable for woodworking was that a) it was a ski-tuning bench and was much too tall to be useful with tools, b) it was a swedish-style* trestle which was not solid enough to prevent racking, and c) I had no idea what a real workbench was supposed to be.

Of course, the cramped quarters of the garage didn’t help much – two motorcycles and a bunch of individually boxed power tools meant that the ski-tuning bench actually stayed up against the wall and didn’t do much more than give me a flat area on which to pile assorted crap necessities.

In late 2010, when my wife was working nights, I purchased the Chris Schwarz book on workbenches.  I read it a few times, and daydreamed about how great it would be to have a massive bench which was useful and didn’t wobble all over the place like my particleboard on sawhorses.  In the summer of 2011, I decided to finally get with the program and build a bench.  This series of posts will detail, to the extent possible, my experience with this project.  Hopefully my mistakes will be of benefit to some other woodworker that is thinking about tackling a project of this scale.

* I have no idea if this is how they build benches in Sweden.  It’s basically a stretcher with a long tenon on each end and secured by large hardwood wedges (instead of pins) on the outside of the leg.  My uncle learned this style of construction while in Sweden, so in my family, this is a “Swedish style” bench.

Stay tuned…

-P