A Workbench

This is a beautiful piece of furniture. I made a workbench.

The beauty of this bench is such that I would be afraid to use it. It is that darn beautiful.

My bench is 60″ by 27″ by 34.5″ It was made from construction lumber, 2x10s, 2x4s, and 4x4s. Now that it is done, I don’t know that I can move it. It is that heavy. I might have to get retractable wheels for it.

This is the basic starting tool for woodworking. Until you have a chance to work on a real workbench, designed for hand tools, you don’t understand just how much of a tool it is.

For years, my goto woodworking bench was a sheet of 3/4″ plywood over a frame of 2x4s. It was stable enough, but it wasn’t really usable for planing.

There are several things that hand woodworkers do constantly. We saw boards either ripping, resawing, or crosscutting. Cutting tenons is an example of both. We drive chisels into wood and dig out mortises. We make boards flat and straight by planing.

If you swing a mallet and hit something and your mallet bounces, that is wasted energy. A solid workbench doesn’t bounce; it acts perfectly with the mallet, allowing hard strikes or controlled strikes.

If you are planing you need the work to stay in place. If you have your work attached to a flimsy work surface, every time you take a cut, the work and work surface move, stealing work. If you brace your foot against your work surface, you are unlikely to be in the correct position for planing.

If you are sawing, you want the work at the height at the correct angles.

Adding a leg vise to the bench will make it even better. That is happening over the coming days.

I’ll be drilling some holes for bench dogs and other work-holding tools.

So here is the astonishing thing: I had a round item on the workbench, I was planing a test piece. That round item did not move.

The number of times I’ve had things fall off a table because it is wiggling…

I’m excited.

Conclusion

The next steps are to make and attach a leg vise to the table. After that is adding some blocks to the underside of the table where I’ll be drilling 3/4″ holes for the work-holding thing.

There are two projects that come next: a journeyman tote to carry my tools and a 6-board chest for Ally for use at events.

After that is a knockdown cabinet with shelves for Ally to use at events.

Side Note

I was picking up some stair treads at Home Depot on Tuesday. As we were checking out we noticed a sale on the Husky 5-tier tote storage rack. The totes are 27 gallons with the nice flexible plastic. Each rack holds 8 totes by their upper edges and two more can be placed on top for a total of 10 totes.

The totes were on sale for $8 apiece. The rack was $149.

If you are looking for more storage, this might be the right thing for you.