Last post we finally decided on a final design for the workbench.  There are tons of resources out there showing you how to build a workbench, most of which are excellent, so I’m going to try to keep this section relatively short (we’ll see how that works out!).  There is nothing new with the process that I’ll be going through, so this is going to be basically just documenting the process.  I’ll try not to go into too much detail about any one step, but feel free to let me know if you have any questions on any step.

The lumber for the bench has been sitting in the shop for a couple months now, so has had plenty of time to acclimate.  I have about 80 board feet of 8/4 ash material, of which the board widths vary between about 7″ and 8″.

To make all the dimension-ing easy, I’ll take the narrowest board and make that the width for all of the stock.  This will limit the amount of material lost and will make rough cutting all the lumber a snap.  In my case the narrowest board is about 7″, so I’ll rip all the boards to 3.5″ widths.

I did do all of this ripping on the table saw.  Just like having the lumber yard do the S3S-ing, I enjoy working with hand tools, but I’d like to have this done in a reasonable amount of time.  All of that ripping would have taken me ages to do by hand and I have no problem using power tools.  I did do the cross cutting by hand, if that makes up for it!

I grabbed all the top pieces and laid them out, then marked the grain direction on each one to help with flattening the bench later.  I tried to pick the straightest grain sections for the top, but it looks likely there there will be a couple places with reversing grain.

Once all the pieces were rough sized, marked for grain direction, and laid out in order, it was time to start laminating the top.  Pretty straightforward here, just lots of clamps and lots of glue.

To ensure that the joint goes together without any gaps I took a few swipes with a block plane on each mating face.  This gives just a slight hollow to each face, making sure that they mate up nicely.

I added one piece at a time just to make it easier on myself.  It took a bit longer that way (the main section of the top is 11 boards wide), but once the glue goes on the pieces are really slippery, so trying to line up more than one piece is tricky.  Even with just one piece I found lining them up difficult, so I used some f-clamps directly on the joint line to make sure they stay in line when tightening the rest of the clamps.

The shoulder vise actually helped out quite a bit in terms of lining up the top pieces.  Just like a normal shoulder vise, my small one also requires a threaded rod be inserted through the entire depth of the top.  I talked about this previously, but it essentially helps to counteract the clamping force and not let the vise tear itself apart.  Since I don’t have a drill bit that’s 24″ long, I needed to bore this hole as I went.  What I did was actually drill this hole in each piece separately, then use it to align each top piece as I laminated them together (I just stuck an old drill bit through the hole to line them up, then removed it after all the clamps were on – don’t want it glued in place!).  I had some clean-up work to do when the glue squeezed into the hole after each piece was added, but it was no problem boring 3-4″ in to get rid of that.

The legs and stretchers are also laminated together (and the shoulder vise components).  These were a bit easier to deal with because they weren’t so long, but still…more glue…more clamps.

Finally, after all the glue and clamps, it was time to prepare everything for joinery.  There was obviously quite a bit of glue residue along all the joints, but most of this scraped off pretty easily with a few swipes of the No 80 cabinet scraper.  Once I could see what I was working with, I got started on planing everything down.  For the legs and stretchers I picked out one face and edge to use as my reference surfaces and made sure that both were as flat as I could get them and perpendicular to each other.  This was fairly quick work with the Stanley 5c jack plane, which is sharpened with a pretty hefty 8″ camber.  To clean up all the awesome hand plane texture of the jack plane, I used the Millers Falls No 22 jointer plane.  The other two surfaces don’t matter so much, but they will be the show surfaces, so I cleaned them all up nicely.

The procedure for the top was pretty much the same, just quite a bit bigger!  I’m not sure what the top assembly weighed, but it was tough to move around by myself.  I wrestled it upside down (the bottom is the reference face for the legs) on a couple of sawbenches and got to work.

Same deal as the other pieces – started with the jack plane and finished up with the jointer.  It should be noted that I did add the shoulder vise section before flattening using the same laminating procedure as before.  After an hour or so of back breaking work (planing at sawbench height is not recommended!), I had a nice crunchy pile of shavings, and a nice flat top (albeit the bottom of the top).

At this point I’m all set to start attaching the legs.  It’s not worth flattening the top of the top yet, because nothing is being referenced from that, so I left it rough.  It was also helpful not flipping the top over yet, it weighs a ton!  Everything will be attached with drawbored mortise and tenons, but that is a story for next time.  The workbench is done at the moment, it’s just a matter of getting the pictures and posts all sorted, so I promise to be quicker with the next post!