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Five years after starting woodworking, I finally decided to make that desire come true.... and again it was a big project. What sparked it all was when I received my copy of Woodsmith Magazine for October/November 2007 (Volume 29, No 173) and saw the featured project for that issue. In that issue there was a
complete set of plans for building a traditional workbench and it was the
greatest looking bench that I had seen that encumbered all the features
that I wanted. It didn't have drawers underneath to get in my way,
it didn't have many of the other features that were more specialized to
cabinet makers, etc. It was a sleek looking, simple appearing hardwood
bench with both a massive front vice and a handy tail vice. It was
a bench with bulk that just so happened to look good, too! That's
all I wanted and the image of that bench stuck in my mind until I finally
decided to try to build it.
I started the project in the 2nd week of January,2009 and just completed it during the last week of February, 2009 - (I had roughly 108 - 110 hours in the project). Below is a picture of the end result and the story that follows along its progress. In the left photo below is the front cover of Woodsmith's Issue Number 173 and the photo on the right is my completed workbench. Check out some of the other photos later in this article of some of the steps along the way and let me know what you think!
Project Details The photo below shows the lumber stacked on a bench in my shop after unloading it. This lumber is roughly 100 board feet of 8 quarter and 24 feet of 4 quarter hard maple sitting there! Can you say ouch to the pocketbook? ![]()
After the bases and top supports
were completed, I moved on to the band saw to cut the bevels on After the base pieces and top supports were completed, I moved on to making the leg posts. The mortises in these leg posts were also done on the table saw with the same methods that I used on the bases. You can see in the left photo below that I placed all four of the legs together after applying the glue and clamped them all at once. The bottom photo on the right shows all four legs after the glue up. When the parts were unclamped, and while the dado set was installed on the saw, I cut the tenons on the ends of the leg posts. After the leg parts were removed from the clamps, I cut tenons in the sides opposite the leg tenons of the parts to accommodate the stretchers. I also drilled and counter bored holes on the opposite sides (and in alignment with) these tenons so that the side pieces could be bolted to the stretcher system.
After the tenons were cut on both ends of the legs it was time for gluing them into the base and top support pieces. The tenons were cut shorter at the top of the legs to accommodate the lesser thickness of the top supports than the thickness of the bases. (The plan called for these tenon lengths to be about 1/8" shorter than the mortise depths at both ends so that there would be no protrusions to interfere with mating components). The photo on the left (below)
shows one completed end of the bases and top supports after insertion into
the legs and being clamped after the glue up. The photo on the right
(below) shows both of the assembled and glued up end pieces. When
these were done, they were laid aside to await the completion of the stretchers.
You can faintly see the mortises for the stretchers mentioned above in
the right photo below.
Here is what I think was
the neat part: I cut a 3/4" X 3/4" piece of maple and routed a 9/16"
slot half way through the thickness at about the center of the piece.
I created a bevel on all four edges of each end of these pieces to give
them an attractive look. Then I cut tenons on each end of the stretchers
after the glue up to match the mortises in the legs. The neat part
to me is that all you had to do to Although you can't see any of this in the photo here on the right, this is what the stretchers looked like after I glued them up and clamped them.
With the stretchers made, the only thing else left to do was to assemble them to both of the base and top support assemblies. You can see a couple of views of these assemblies below.
At this stage of the game, I was at the point where I needed to begin making the top of the bench. In the sake of keeping this story going about my work bench project, let's just call this point along the progress as the end of part 1 of the project. To get the rest of the story (if you're still with me), Click here! |
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