Roubo Finale!

The finished product!  The last two posts detailed the base construction and the top lamination.  In my excitement to get the final assembly done, I took very few photos.  So I cleaned up the shop today and got some beauty shots and I will also try to go over each of the features of the bench.

First, the point of this workbench.  I have really gotten into hand tool woodworking and have had trouble ever since I started with properly holding the boards down. I have my assembly table, but it was built on wheels to be mobile, not very good for hand planing a board, it just moves all over the place. The moment I started hand tool woodworking, I wanted a big, heavy, immovable workbench. Here it is!

Roubo Workbench - II

The top of this workbench needs to be big, bulky, tough and most importantly, heavy.  With the Base complete, It was time to laminate the top sections.  Since this will be a ‘Split-Top’ bench, there will be 2 sections for the top with a gap for a tool holder in the middle. One section I can glue up to full width right away, but the other section gets some special treatment due to the vise that will be inset into it.

The first thing to do is to prepare the lumber to be cut to size.  Since I buy rough cut lumber, the edges are neither clean nor straight, and before I can put the boards through the table saw to cut them to width.  When you have a rough edge, there is a high chance that it will become bound in the table saw and be very dangerous.

So to clean up an edge, I turned to my hand-planes.

I used this method on both the rough cut skinny boards as well as the wider boards that I sized on the band saw.  The edge of the board was still quite rough after  the band saw so there wasn't much difference between the 2.

If I was able to keep them thick enough I would need 12 boards, roughly 4.5” wide and 8 feet long. So when I planed the boards down, I kept as much thickness as possible without trying to make them even or similar.