We’ve had two late cancellations for the June 16-20, 2017, class on building a Moravian workbench at Roy Underhill’s school in Pittsboro, N.C.. If you are free that week and interested in building one heck of a workbench, you can sign up here.
— Will Myers
As many of you know, I’ve had great success building workbenches using thick slabs that are wet (extremely wet) with less than a year of air-drying. Read more about that here.
I purchased my bench kit from Lesley Caudle (lesley27011@yahoo.com), a sawyer in North Carolina. Read more about his sawmill here.
Now Re-Co Bkyln is also offering slab bench kits using lumber that has been reclaimed from the New York City environs. The kits include all the stock you need to make a bench, including a single 6”-thick slab top plus stock for legs, stretchers and a vise chop.
The kit is $999 plus trucking fees ($200 to $400 depending on where you live).
Full details on the Re-Co bench kits are here.
The people at Re-Co are great. John and I have met many of them personally. And they do good work – salvaging urban trees for furniture and now workbenches. Check it out.
— Christopher Schwarz
Reader Marcello Kozik sent us a fantastic video of guitars being made on Roman workbenches in Brazil. Take a look at all the ingenious ways the bench is used – including resawing.
Be sure to watch to the end when he plays the guitar.
https://www.facebook.com/porteiradovioleiro/videos/1927487927482811/
— Christopher Schwarz
In the years since I wrote about and hosted a video on building the knockdown workbench from the collection at Old Salem, N.C., folks have sent me hundreds of photos of the benches they have built. I absolutely love getting these. I am always interested to see the different vise set-ups, materials and alterations different people have done with the design.
I few days ago, Luther Shealy sent some photos of a Moravian work bench he has nearly completed. Shealy is in the U.S. Army stationed in South Korea. He had to leave his Roubo bench behind when he was deployed overseas.
Fortunately the Army base has a morale and welfare shop the servicemen can use, and he decided to build a bench for use while in Korea. He was able to source the pine parts of the bench on location, but the oak part proved to be problem. Undeterred, Shealy had friends back home mail him enough white oak for the short stretchers. He brought the oak vise chop over in his luggage; that must have been interesting trip thru TSA!
I very much admire Shealy’s determination to make this happen in a less-than-ideal situation.
— Will Myers
After reading hundreds (thousands?) of historical woodworking texts I have noticed a mantra for making furniture: Use wood that is well-seasoned.
It’s fantastic advice. Perhaps it’s even the starting point for all fine furniture making. But does it apply to building your workbench? If we follow the historical texts, then yes. I have yet to find any old book that says: The stock for your bench can be a little (or a lot) wet.
And yet, here’s the problem that I have discovered after years of building benches. Thick stock (6”, for example) can take way more than a decade to dry. I’ve cut into 6”-thick slabs that had been air-dried for 13 years that were more than 60 percent moisture content (MC). That’s way above the 6 percent recommended by many books.
Should one wait 50 more years with these slabs? Use MDF instead?
After working with massive wet slabs for the last seven years or so, I offer this recommendation based on personal experience – not on historical research or anything I’ve gleaned from my library:
Use wet wood for your benchtop. Even if it has been seasoned less than a year, you’ll be OK. Just be prepared to flatten the thing. And don’t be an idiot about your undercarriage (that sounds like advice to my teenage self).
Here’s my strategy with wet slabs: Use a species for the benchtop that dries readily, such as red oak. For the undercarriage, use wood that is at equilibrium moisture content. Because these components are rarely more than 3” thick they can be kiln-dried.
This combination works well in my experience. The undercarriage is dry. It won’t shrink. But it acts like a frame for drying the top, which shrinks around the joints on the tops of the legs.
Yes, the top will distort a bit as it dries. But you’re a woodworker – flatten the sucker.
But when the benchtop finishes drying after a few years, you will find it to be glorious. Slab tops don’t move much (if at all) after a few years in the shop. They just sit there like a machinist’s reference surface.
I think it’s worth the effort to find a slab. And I think it’s worth the effort to work with a wet one.
The last few wet slabs I’ve worked with came from North Carolina sawyer Lesley Caudle. He sells kits for workbenches that are inexpensive and ready to go – you just have to pick them up or work with Lesley to get them trucked to you. (You can email Lesley at lesley27011@yahoo.com.) Don’t be alarmed if the benchtop was cut less than 12 months ago. Embrace it.
— Christopher Schwarz