My woodworking workbench is finally done! Started it late last summer and finished it this week. It’s been a labor of love, and I’ve enjoyed every minute, every aspect of the project from start to finish. I don’t think I’ve ever undertaken a project that I enjoyed so much. Also during the project, I’ve been upgrading and adding equipment I didn’t have to build my ‘ultimate’ woodworking shop. I have almost everything I’ve ever wanted in my shop, although there’s always room for bigger equipment! This workbench has been my first large woodworking project. I’ve made many large complex assemblies from metal, but none from wood, and my metal working days ended about a decade and a half ago. During this project I practiced joinery and learned to effectively hand plane (I now own 8 handplanes, none before I started).
My workbench is designed to break down into 6 major components for moving, bench top, left and right leg assy’s, 2 stretchers, and the tool tray. The rear vise jaw on the front vise raises to become a full width bench dog. The bench is made allmost entirely of maple, with a couple boards of white oak in the approx 3″ thick benchtop, the tail vise is made from red oak. The tool tray is framed in red oak as well. Finish is three coats of Tung oil (so far). That’s it. See ForestGirls reply for picture. I accidently deleted this one trying to resize it.
Jeff
Edited 3/18/2007 12:27 am by jeff100
Replies
It looks great, and very functional. Nice and heavy.
What are you building next?
TWG
Impressive. That's nice work. Now what are you going to build ON the bench?! Rich ;)
Very nice indeed. Congratulations. I have a question: How did you cut those nice even half-moons for the bolt assemblies for the stretchers on the legs?
The cutouts were done by determining where I wanted them located from the end and both edges, leaving enough material that would give me the strength I wanted, and a cutout large enough to accomodate the bolt/nut. I drilled holes at the top and bottom of the back edge of the cutout. You're going to laugh at this part. I used a roll of duct tape to give me the large arc from tangent to the upper hole, to tangent to the lower hole. This gave me my shape and I liked the scale. I cut it out carefully with a jigsaw. I then used a sanding drum and sleeve in a drill press to sand the interior smooth. Once the first cutout was done to this point, I used it to trace out the other three. I cut the other three out using the same steps. Then I used a 1/4 carbide round over bit in a hand held router to ease the edges on both sides. The cutouts came out very nice, I think anyway. The end of the stretchers are also tenoned to fit mortises cut into the legs. It's a very solid assembly when tight.
Jeff
Edited 3/18/2007 12:55 am by jeff100
I won't laugh. I use various cans jars and tubes all the time to trace arcs. Did you use a hand jig saw (as in fret saw), a power saber saw, or did you use a powered bench jig saw?
The reason for my questions is that I have been trying to figure our how to execute just such euro-style joints on a couple of stands I am making for my shop, and as of yet have not come up with a strategy I like. Yours look very nice and also very sound.
Wow! Really nice! I'm sure we have quite a few dial-up users who are wanting to see it, so I downsized the pic, I hope small enough.
forestgirl -- you can take the girl out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the girl ;-)
Thanks FG, I didn't think about dialup connections...
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