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!
There are 2 vises on this workbench. A leg vise and a tail vise. The leg vise is the big guy on the
front. The Benchcrafted vises I used
have great big cast iron wheels that have a ton of momentum This means that I can just spin the vise
freely and it will coast all the way in and lock down my board.
The leg vise is best used to stabilize boards that I am edge
jointing. This is when I want to put a
straight and perfectly square edge on a board, like you would when you want to
glue a few of them together.
This board is already straight, but could use some touch-up
to remove the table-saw marks. I will use
my smoothing plane to get a fresh edge on the board.
When the boards are larger than can be handled by the vise
alone, there are other areas where they can be supported. Here I have a long reclaimed oak board that I
am making a sitting bench for my dining table. It is 12” wide and 6 feet long
and quite heavy, to support it, I use a holdfast in a pre-drilled hole in the
front leg. When the holdfast is set, it
holds just as tight as my big vise.
The leg vise also has other uses, like holding the pieces
vertically to hand saw a tenon cheek.
The other vise is a tail vise. It sits on the end of the bench and is near
the front. It lines up with the dog
holes that were attached to the top when we were still gluing the top together.
The tail vise excels at holding flat pieces down to the
bench. When I need to handplane the face
of a board I just pop up the correct dogs and close up the vise.
The nice thing about handplanes is that, when sharp, they
can leave a surface that is ready for finish without the need to sand.
The bench itself has a large lower shelf for holding tools
and accessories and on the front of that is the triangular guide for the
sliding deadman.
The sliding deadman acts as another set of hands for the
pieces that just don’t fit the bench. It can move up and down the length and
has many holes to appropriately place the holdfast wherever it is needed.
Finally, the last feature of the bench is the tool
holder. It is a few strips of thin wood
and some spacers that was sized to fit the gap between the top sections. The tool holder can sit flush with the top or
it can sit a little proud to act as another stop.
I have made a few accessories to go along with the
bench. My most favorite is the Moxon
Vise. It is simply 2 pieces of wood and
2 screw vises oriented in such a way to form a very wide and very strong
vise. Its main use is for holding boards
that would be too wide or too long for the leg vise to handle, like when cutting
dovetails in wide boards.
I also have made some bench hooks. They are simply a piece of wood that has 2
strips on opposite sides. They sit on
the bench and the bottom strip rests against the front. This leaves the top-side strip to hold the
workpiece. This works great for sawing because
the harder you or the saw pushes forward, the more stable the workpiece
becomes.
Oops, my demonstration piece wasn't cut straight.
Fixed!
I have also made some other little tools, like winding
sticks, used to check if there is any twist in the board...
And a walnut straightedge.
I hope you enjoyed this workbench, I know I sure enjoyed
making and using it. Now that the bench
is done, it is time to finish off that dining table I started so long ago.
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