While visiting North Carolina this week, I visited the shop of blacksmith Peter Ross and saw a few of his dang-amazing full-size Andre Roubo-style holdfasts in the works.
I’ve been using this holdfast every day on my bench at home. It is an incredible piece of iron and a great asset when sawing, mortising or planing on my bench. And, best of all, it makes other holdfasts look like pipe cleaners.
Peter says he’s built about a dozen of these holdfasts since he made mine. And though they take a lot of physical effort to produce, the biggest challenge is in finding the material that is suited for a holdfast of this size.
These holdfasts are more expensive than smaller ones – about $385. But the craftsmanship is outstanding, and they function brilliantly. If you cannot swing the price of a full-on Roubo holdfast, I highly recommend the Joseph Moxon-style ones that Peter makes, which hold better in thick benches than any holdfast I’ve ever used, and they have a low profile. Those are more like $80 each. Read my discussion of them here.
One of the workbench problems I’ve yet to solve is what you should do if you don’t have a dedicated place to work.
I’ve seen lots of portable, fold-up benches, but none that I thought were worth building. I’ve seen many vintage plans for workbench tops that are supposed to go on top of your kitchen table. But again, none inspired me enough to take up a saw.
Yesterday a reader sent me a link to the photo above. Damn. I don’t have time for this, but I just might have to build that thing and see how it works. It’s just too ingenious (and crazy) not to build.
If you are still a bit confused, the photo is showing the underside of the portable benchtop. The two clamps at the top of the photo attach the rig to a worktable. The whole thing is 1-5/8” thick, 9-5/8” wide and 31” long – smaller than I assumed when I first saw the photo.
Here is why this is clever/crazy enough to build.
1. The face vise. You have two screws and four holes. You can move the screws around to clamp whatever you have at hand. It’s a double-screw, it’s a shoulder vise. It mows the yard.
2. The dog holes. Despite the fact that the holes are deep into the assembly, they are still near an edge. So you could still use fenced planes with this benchtop – a big plus in my book.
3. The wooden wagon vise. That’s just cool.
What are the downsides? My biggest concern is the weight combined with the cantilever. I imagine that you have to clamp this to a pretty stout table or a fixed countertop. Even so, I wouldn’t want to mortise over a portion of this bench that was unsupported.
The example is for sale at this Australian tool auction site. So if you live in Australia and buy it, drop me a note about how it works. The auctioneer’s description says it’s of “Scandinavian origin,” so if you’ve seen one in Europe, drop me a line. I’d love to learn more about this gizmo.
Despite the photo above, you do not need two benches in your workshop. I have two benches for the following reasons:
1. The cherry workbench belongs to Katy, my 11-year-old.
2. I have to take lots of photos and video during a typical day, and being able to shoot from both sides of the bench makes my life much easier.
3. Taking photos while using my daughter’s bench protects you (the sensitive reader) from having to see lots and lots of photos of my rumored buttocks.
Several readers have asked about my favorite specifications for a second bench, so here they are: Don’t make one. But, you might ask, won’t a second bench be better for assembly? No, a second bench will only gather crap. Instead, make your only bench longer and assemble stuff on that. Or assemble on your sawbenches.
Right now I have a third workbench, as well, the Holtzapffel. It’s in our sunroom. I hope to move that bench onto its new home soon and move Katy’s cherry workbench up to our sunroom so she can work there – on her homework, crafts or whatever.
Then I’ll have one bench and more floor space. And you will see more photos of my backside.
The workbenches we built this week at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking this week are a little different than the French benches I’ve built at other classes. The biggest change: We attached the top to the base with four through-mortises instead of the combination mortise-and-dovetail joint I’ve used in the past.
Why? Time and volume.
We had to make 17 8’-long workbenches in only five days using 6,000 pounds of material. In past classes we’ve done this class in six days, built shorter benches or let the students worry about vises when they got home.
So I set out to engineer a design that was suited to our material – 6×6 Douglas Fir beams – the limited number of workshop hours when we could use the machinery – 42 hours – and for a class that was made up of mostly beginners.
The above design is what I drafted, and it almost worked.
I eliminated the four sliding dovetails and increased the size of the four through-tenons. I’ve seen this feature on surviving benches so I know it works. And it saved us hours of handwork to cut the dovetails. The through-mortises in the top were cut before assembly by kerfing the extents of the mortise and removing the waste with a mortiser. This worked remarkably well. All the benches slid together with few problems.
The real star of the class was the material itself – 6×6 beams of kiln-dried Douglas Fir that the school purchased from the J. Gibson McIlvain Co. The material arrived in our hands with an actual dimension of 5-1/2” x 5-1/2”. My hope was that we would be able to plane the stuff down to 4-1/2” x 4-1/2”. The stuff was remarkably stable and well-behaved. We surfaced almost every stick down to 5-3/8” x 5-3/8”, so it wasn’t very twisted, cupped or bowed.
That saved time on machining and emptying the dust collector.
So where did my plan stumble? I think we all ran out of energy by the fifth day and didn’t push hard enough at the end to get everyone’s vises on. Everyone who wanted to assemble their bench got it assembled (I think that’s correct). But most of them only got a start on their vises by the time we started cleaning up by 2 p.m. Saturday.
I’m quite happy with the design of this bench and the material. It was darn clear and almost entirely free of heart, so it didn’t split as much as some construction timbers. If I had an extra day, I might add the dovetail back onto the design, just because it looks so nice. But I don’t think the addition of the dovetail or the lack of it will change the usability of the bench.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. You can download a SketchUp drawing of this design from Google’s 3D Warehouse using this link.
In case you are living under a rock, the Wood Whisperer Marc Spagnuolo and his band of guilders are building the split-top Roubo workbench as part of a group thing.
Recently Marc interviewed me via Skype about my thoughts on split-top Roubo benches and thong underwear. It was an hour-long interview, and I am sure that I offended at least five indigenous cultures in this hemisphere.
So if you want to learn about how I am impossibly shy and afraid of human contact, listen to the interview. Want to know what I think of Douglas fir as a bench material? What I think of Benchcrafted vises — for real? Why I’ve never built the split-top design? My favorite benchtop finish that doesn’t involve pornography?
Sigh. I should never do interviews.
Marc has posted the entire interview for your listening derision here.
Peter says he’s built about a dozen of these holdfasts since he made mine. And though they take a lot of physical effort to produce, the biggest challenge is in finding the material that is suited for a holdfast of this size.
