Above is a trailer for our video “Roubo Workbench: By Hand & Power” that Will Myers and I shot earlier this year. If you are thinking about building a French workbench using a giant slab, you might find the 4-hour-long video helpful.
The video is downloadable and has no DRM (digital rights management), so you can put it on any device you like and carry Will (and my off-color jokes that survived the editing process) with you wherever you please.
— Christopher Schwarz
Burn that to a DVD, and I’m in for at least one copy.
Since it is DRM-free, I’d suggest you download the video to a USB thumb drive. Many modern TVs have USB ports on them and the ability to decode most major digital video formats. If your TV manual mentions anything like “media server” or MP4 playback, then you’re probably good to go. Also, if you or your kids have a video game system hooked up to the TV, it will almost definitely play this video easily, too.
There are some other creative and very handy options in which you can share this video with yourself, but I’ll leave it at that because done incorrectly it would be unfair to Chris and Will.
That’s quite helpful. My biggest complaint about a lack of DVDs has been that I like to go over to my dad’s (79) and watch woodworking videos with him. Though he has an Apple TV box (gift I gave him 2 or 3 years ago), I have felt limited by not being able to watch a lot of things that are now coming out. A thumb drive may indeed work on his 4 year old tv and open up all kinds of videos unavailable on DVD on YouTube.
I’ll give a quick unsolicited review — this is a great video, well-worth the price. The price may seem a bit high at first, but you should know a few things. Chris says some of this above, but I wanted to add a little from the consumer perspective.
1) It is DRM-free so you can do with it as you wish. I reiterate this point because, in practice, this means if you’ve got an old device of almost any sort with a screen and a USB port or internet connection, you can get this video there, and have the video in your shop as you build. I can’t take my $1k work laptop in my shop. But I can easily copy this video over to my 9 year old personal laptop and subject it to shavings and whatever other indignities come about.
2) It’s 4 hours. Think about how much it costs to buy a big-budget feature film on Blu-Ray that’s ~2 hours long. Alright then — now it should be apparent that this is a good price.
3) Will and Chris structured the video really well (and the download comes with a “contents” page to tell you where to jump to for different parts). I will be building mine mostly by hand tools. I watched the full thing first to learn about the power methods and see what things might work for my situation, and I suggest everyone does the same. But since then I’ve jumped around and re-watched specific sections/tasks that I had questions or confusion about.
One last thing… while everyone knows that Chris’s bench book is great, I found this video to be a much better guide to me understanding the Roubo build. This may seem like an obvious statement, since a walk-through video and a book are looking to accomplish two different things. But I wanted to point it out. I’m not hear to suggest you to spend less money on Schwarz-backed endeavors (he’s got a kid in college!), but if you are looking for the best bang for your buck and are on the fence between the book and this video, you have to ask yourself if you’re still not sure what type of bench you want to build. If you aren’t sure, get the book. If you are sure, or heavily leaning to the Roubo, get the video.
I have Will Myers’ video on building the Moravian-style workbench that he writes about here http://tmaking.wkfinetools.com/01-shopApl/moravBench/moravianBench-01.asp. If you are looking at bench styles, the Moravian style is worth a look and is not in the Schwarz book (at least not my 1st edition). It’s advantage is it can be disassembled or reassembled in a minute, so is easy to move. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKI4aQtIRlg
Produced by Joshua Farnsworth, the Moravian bench video (Will’s first) is a good one and expands on the detail in Will’s article on building the bench using “armstrong” tools.
Good camera work.
Who was the cinematographer?
See https://blog.lostartpress.com/2017/01/20/roubo-workbench-by-hand-power/ for details.
They did a good job keeping the camera shots lively. Nothing worse than a one camera staight ahead video shoot.
Thanks for yet another video to scatter my brain. I’m in the process of building my first proper workbench just under a decade since I picked up my first chisel. Now that I’m on the home stretch I couldn’t imagine attempting this when I first started out. I’m basically using every single skill to finish this thing and I still find myself lacking. It doesn’t help that I’m basing it on the Moravian model – damn you again Chris for digging that one up!
I’m glad that Woodworking businesses are starting to make the switch from cased DVD to downloadable videos. I’ve never understood why they have taken so long to do so. Many new high end laptops made today don’t have a DVD player anymore as their simply is no need for them. As for price I’m not going to comment as it’s not my place nor business to do so. I enjoyed the trailer and loved the music but not her singing,but all in all I think it would be well worth the download.