Lego Workbenches

Last week, we received a treat of an email from Douglas Lambert, who recreated three workbenches from “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” by Christopher Schwarz* in Lego form, and sent us detailed plans for each:

“The Nicholson”

 “Le Roubo”

“Ye Knockdown Nicholson”

You can download the plans for free at each of the links above.

We reached out to Lambert to learn more about him and his work.

“I’m a video editor from Brazil, living in São Paulo,” he says. “I love Lego – it’s been a passion of mine since I was a kid – but I also have a big fascination with woodworking (my grandfather was a woodworker, so I think I got it from him). For a brief period of time, I actually tried to be a woodworker, but I couldn’t really do it because I just don’t have the space for a working woodshop in my apartment. So, I started reading a bunch of stuff about it and decided that if I couldn’t be a ‘physical woodworker,’ I could be like an ‘academic woodworker’ in a sort of way. I follow the community, read the magazines, and love the books from Lost Art Press.”

Lambert says after spending so much time researching woodworking, he wanted to create something adjacent to the craft that people could actually build.

“I had previously designed a full woodworking shop for the Lego Ideas website, but it didn’t get the proper votes to become an approved project,” he says.

(Previously, he designed another project based on the Brazilian Ipê tree that got some great attention.)

“Since I already had Chris Schwarz’s book on workbenches because of my plans to one day build a real one, I decided to take on a new challenge,” Lambert says. “If I couldn’t have a real bench in my home, I could turn Chris’s iconic workbench projects into Lego sets. That way, I could finally have a woodworking bench that I could put right on my editing desk as a nice piece of decoration.”

It took Lambert about two days to come up with the design for the three sets.

“Doing the very first one was definitely the most difficult part,”  he says. “I had to figure out the proper relationship between the Lego parts and the scale of a proper workbench, and I had to create a whole new design ‘language’ from scratch. I had to figure out how to make a wood plane look right, how to create the wood shavings, get the color schemes down and make sure everything was recognizable as woodworking tools using the proper Lego pieces.”

He designed everything digitally in a program called Studio, which gave him access to unlimited bricks.

“Once I cracked the code on the first bench, the other two went much faster,” he says. “After finishing the digital models, I bought the actual pieces to see if the design worked in real life, and they turned out very stable and awesome to look at.”

Lambert originally offered these instructions on his website.

“I used to sell them for a dollar, but I’ve decided to share them for free,” he says.

If you’d like to support Lambert’s work, you can use the site to leave a donation of a dollar or whatever you like.

“It’s just a cool way for me to share these designs with the community and help other people get these little benches onto their own workspaces,” he says.

— Kara Gebhart Uhl

*Copies of Christopher Schwarz’s “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” (Popular Woodworking Books, 2010) are readily available on the secondary market.