Nearly all of the workbenches I’ve built have been in other people’s shops – those that belonged to a school, a friend or an employer. So I’ve always worked with the tools they had. Or I worked under some artificial pretense – building a bench with only hand tools or a certain budget or a time limit.
In fact, I’ve never built an entire workbench in my own dang shop on my own terms.
That fact occurred to me as I was driving home some legs with a sledgehammer. Yes, a sledge. That’s what I prefer to use to drive workbench joints. But when outside of my shop I rarely have one (I usually leave it in my other sledgy pants), and so I make do with mallets, gravity or (no lie) cinder blocks.
What else is different in my shop? The through-mortises in the benchtop. I have cut these every way imaginable, from all-chisel, all-ibuprofen, all-the-time to a Mafell chainsaw mortiser.
In my shop, I take a three-stage approach that works well for me. I bore out most of the waste with an auger. Then I bust up the waste with an electric jigsaw. Using the jigsaw, I kerf all the walls down to my knife lines. The kerfs serve as a guide for my chisel. When the kerfs are chiseled away from the inside of the mortise, the wall is plumb or undercut. Period. End of story.
Today I cut all the mortises for my French oak workbench using this method. Within two hours I was driving the legs in with a sledge. The legs were going to go in on the first test-fit. No lie. Then I thought better of it. After all, getting the legs out of the mortises is much harder.
So I came upstairs and wrote this blog entry.
— Christopher Schwarz
It is funny how sometimes I work different when alone, usually a do what I say not what I do. Relax have a cool beverage.
I think Mr. Roubo just spun in his grave.
Not sure, after drilling two holes he could have taken his ‘scie à débiter’ a 24″ frame saw with a 3/4″ blade and sawn the mortise to the line, done but for the extremities in need a little chisel work.
It has been my experience that just about everything goes together easier when alcohol is the lubricant. Good luck.
Are you finished with the mortise?
Yeah. Finished with all the mortises.
Two hours for for leg mortises? Wow, I’m stunned. And slow, apparently. I’ll have to try the jigsaw approach. I’m feeling a vacation day coming on.
Well there goes that hit-a-joint-together-with-your-hat theory.
Hit-with-your-hat is only for draw bored joints… These are “normal” M&Ts, and are structurally dependent on the cheeks mating well, where drawbored M&T’s depend on the pin and the shoulder for their strength…
You have to admit, the Mafell was cool.
how do you get the legs back out of the joint to be able to do the stretcher M&Ts without smashing up the joints you have so carefully done… I am right at this stage now… all the joints are made in the legs and the top (except for a bit of paring of the leg joints as I was being overly cautious with the mortises on the bench and under sized them a bit too much it seems) and I am really agonising over how to go about this test fitting of the legs to the top… getting in I can see is the easy part (even if I have to use a sledge) but getting them out is where I can see the joints getting damaged as I have to bash the joint end to get them out 🙁 any suggestions on how to do this will go a long way to easing my fears 🙂
cheers from Oz
Trevor
It’s actually easy. I was kidding in the blog post above.
Flip the bench over and onto something (anything) that is taller than the bench. A kitchen countertop. A table saw. Whatever.
Put a block of wood onto the tenon that is a wee bit smaller than the tenon. Hit the block of wood with the sledge and the leg will descend. You might have to prop the benchtop up higher (use a 4×4) to get the leg out all the way.
Easy-peasy.
cool… thanks for that Chris… figured that that must have been the way but good to get assurance that it was OK to do it like that… just getting back into woodworking after a long time (far too long) out of it so tend to be stepping into it a bit (too) cautiously 🙂
cheers and thanks again for all your help along this journey
As you know, I chopped mine by hand after drilling out the majority of the waste. In hind sight, would I do that again? I think so. I mean, it was a lot of work, but I had a BIG mallet and it went pretty smoothly. I got some cheap therapy out of it, and quite frankly, I enjoy hard labor. My walls were pretty clean and plumb and the tenons fit pretty well for the most part. I think I would maybe try the jig saw trick to remove a lot of the junk between the holes, that seems like a good idea.
All in all, I think woodworking is a personal journey. Find the path you enjoy taking and casually flip the bird to all the naysayers on the way by. At least that is my philosophy. So glad to see the FORP is still in progress!