Category: Workbenches

I have always wanted to make one of these grease boxes for the underside of a workbench. Knowing me, however, I’d probably keep paraffin in it instead of tallow. I learned to handplane using paraffin (which has no smell) as a lubricant. There is something odd about using mutton tallow – I work up a sweat and smell lamb chops.

A.J. Roubo does not say much about the grease box or how it should be constructed: “Below the table of the bench you attach with a screw a piece of wood in the form of a box, in which you put some grease, useful for rubbing the tools to make them smoother.”

I decided to make the box 1-7/8” thick, 3” wide and 5-1/2” long and out of oak. But I started with a bigger chunk of oak to make it easier to bore out the cavity that holds grease and to hold the piece as I finished chiseling the cavity.

The walls of the grease box are about 5/16” thick – give or take. That makes the cavity roughly 2-1/4” wide, 3-1/2” long and 1-1/2” deep. I bored out most of the waste and cleaned up the interior with a chisel.

Then I used a compass to draw a nice arc around the back of the box, as shown in Plate 11 of “l’Art du menuisier.” After rounding that off with rasps and sandpaper, I drew the curved relief under the box. This relief allows you to use a shorter lag screw, and it looks nice. I simply sketched it freehand and then roughed it out.

I also rounded the square corners of the box, a la Plate 11.

The box will be attached to the bench with a 5/16” x 3” lag screw and washer. I created a flat area for the washer (thank you, Forstner bit) and then bored a clearance hole for the lag screw.

Then I oiled up the exterior of the box and am now soaking the hardware in citric acid to remove the buttocks-ugly zinc plating.

This is the last little bit on this bench. I have only to apply my signature plate and await the truck that will come to pick it up.

— Christopher Schwarz

Most drawers attached to the benchtop of a workbench get in the way of clamping, the bench dogs or the holdfasts. And so when I build a workbench for a customer, I typically omit the drawer (with their permission, of course).

But this bench that I’m finishing up needs a drawer, and so I was determined to make it look just like the drawer in A.J. Roubo’s Plate 11 and not get in the way.

Roubo didn’t have much to say about the drawer: “One should place a drawer at the end of the bench so that the workers can close up their minor tools like gouges, compasses, etc.” That brevity gave me a lot of leeway as to how the drawer should be constructed and hung.

As to construction, the drawer is built like a typical 18th-century drawer. The rear corners are joined with through-dovetails. The front corners are joined with half-blinds. The bottom slides in through the back of the drawer via a groove in the sides and drawer front.

The sides, back and bottom are all 1/2”-thick pine. The remainder of the parts are made with 7/8”-thick oak. The drawer itself is 7” high, 10” wide and 15-1/2” deep. I came to this measurement by scaling Roubo’s drawing of the drawer compared to the rest of the bench.

But how to hang the drawer? If I were worried about theft, I would design the mechanism differently. But as this bench is destined for a private shop, I decided to make the runners and slides robust and repairable.

The two drawer runners are each constructed of two pieces of oak screwed to the underside of the benchtop to create an “L” shape. Then I glued two slides to the drawer sides that slide back and forth in the runners. It’s basically a side-hung drawer. You’ll note that the slides are about 17” long, which will allow for some over-travel if the drawer is pulled out too far.

I nailed a couple of drawer stops to the benchtop and oiled everything up to match the bench.

All this is left is to mortise in the strike for the lock.

This might not be the way that Roubo would have done it, but until I get my Ouija board dialed into 1767, this will have to do.

— Christopher Schwarz

The question of whether early workbenches were built from green wood or seasoned wood has a simple answer: yes.

But what was the common practice? For that question, I turned to A.J. Roubo’s “l’Art du menuisier” for the simple reason that Roubo’s work is still the legal standard in Europe for determining what is proper woodworking practice.

All the following translated passages will be found in “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Furniture” in 2016. The translations are by Donald C. Williams, Michele Pietryka-Pagán and Philippe Lafargue.

The logical place to start is the text for Plate 11. But Roubo doesn’t offer advice on the wetness or dryness of the wood. Following are the only discussions of workbench wood selection in Plate 11:

This bench is of elm or beech wood but more commonly the latter, which is very solid and of a tighter/denser grain than the other….

One should observe also to put the heart-wood side of the bench on top because it is harder than the other, and if the wood experiences dimensional changes, it is more likely to change from this side rather than shrinking from the other side.

It should be noted that throughout “l’Art du menuisier” Roubo discusses certain parts that must be well-seasoned (i.e. dry). But he doesn’t mention it in Plate 11.

If, however, we look to Plate 4 we get some clues. Plate 4 is about the maintenance of a wood yard outside your shop – how to stack green wood so it will dry without warping or rotting.

The reason you need a wood yard?

What I am saying here is only general. I know perfectly well that all woodworkers cannot have great wood yards nor large provisions of wood. But still, for reasons of economy, they should always do their best to be well prepared with samples, and to watch over their preservation as best as they can, so as not to be obliged to have to buy some from the merchants. The wood that they sell is almost never dry, and the woodworker will pay dearly for what the wood merchants have.

In the text for Plate 4, Roubo doesn’t discuss workbench wood directly. But workbenches are discussed:

Beech is found cut into planks of 15-18 lines, and even 2 thumbs thickness by 7, 9 and 12 feet in length.They also sell slabs of this wood for making woodworking benches, tables for the kitchen, and butcher tables, tables that have a length from 7-12, and even 15 feet, by 18-30 thumbs in width, and 5-6 thumbs thickness.

And Roubo also discusses dryness in general:

The more wood is hard, the more time it takes to dry. That is why one should not reasonably use wood that has not been cut at least 8 years in order to be able to do good work. It is not necessary, however, that it be too dry, especially for pieces of joinery, where the wood has no more sap and where the humidity is totally expunged: this cannot be appropriate [once the sap no longer is flowing from the lumber and the moisture has departed there is no need to season the lumber any further].

Interestingly, French timber merchants still follow this rule, according to Bo Childs, who brought over all the French oak for the French Oak Roubo Project. Our slabs were at least 10 years old.

What I take away from the text to these two plates is that seasoned wood was the norm in the shop. Roubo offered no exceptions for workbenches (something he does offer later in the book on garden woodwork).

This lines up with my experience building these benches: chances are the wood is going to be semi-dry. Not fresh cut. Not dry as a popcorn fart. Eight years is not enough time for these slabs to fully acclimate, but you can build benches with them. They’ll move around on you quite a bit the first year or so. But it’s easy to manage if you own a handplane.

— Christopher Schwarz