Don’t get me wrong, I like talking about workbench design. But I easily get five e-mails or phone messages a day about the topic, and sometimes I think I should open a 900-line for woodworkers with questions about bench design.
Here’s the TV commercial: Imagine me wearing only a shop apron (i.e. picture a monkey at the zoo with glasses and a shop apron). There’s some candlelight – tallow candles, natch. And a little Vaseline on the lens of the camera for that “soft” effect that hides the crows’ feet around my eyes.
Cue the wife-swapping music.
Then cue my husky, nasal voice, slightly slurred from the date-rape drug my boss slipped into my coffee to convince me to do this.
“How big is it? Press 1 to talk about how large it should be, and if you need a third leg.”
“Should you put wood in those holes? Press 2 to chat about wood dogs or brass ones. I have a pair of brass ones.”
“Who doesn’t want a twin-screw? Press 3 to talk about wood screws and 4 to see if you should upgrade to metal.”
“Do you have a curly crotch? Press 5 to talk about your wood options. Just 99 cents a minute. 1-900-Got Wood.”
OK, that’s is quite enough of that. Good thing our human resources people are out this week.
People want me to bless their mistakes when they design a workbench.
Just about every week, someone writes or calls me to say that they have designed their own workbench. But because it violates some of the principles of good bench design (as I see it) from my book “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use,” they want me to sign off on it before they start cutting wood.
No matter how silly the bench is, I always sign off on it. That’s because here’s what I’ve learned about people during the last 41 years: You cannot change their minds without a monumental effort. Believe me, I’ve tried pushing that rock up that hill. And I’m dang tired of it.
Build what you want because… listen, can you hear that? It’s the sound of trees growing. You can always build another bench.
Today I finally completed my latest workbench, a fairly pure Andre Roubo-style bench using massive timbers and built using (mostly) hand tools. After I built the skeleton of the bench, I decided to add some tool storage that was in the spirit of the the great Roubo. Here’s what I did:
I turned the lower shelf into a tool well with a covered lid. I’m sure someone has done this before, but I haven’t yet seen it in any old (or new) book (Edit: Roy Underhill did this. See below). In essence, I put a shelf inside the stretchers of the workbench’s base, then I added a lid that covers the shelf. The idea here is to provide just enough storage for your daily users. Pull them out of the toolbox, place them on the top of the lid and get to work. Put them away at the end of the day.
Also, I added an authentic French “rack” to the back edge of the benchtop. This rack holds all my chisels, vital marking tools and turnscrews. I secured it with some awesome Roman-style headed nails. Those were fun to install.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sure to add a locking drawer under a portion of the benchtop that I don’t use so much.
The bottom line here is that tool storage on workbenches was fairly minimal in the 18th century. And I think it should be minimal today, as well. So what should you do with all the tools you haven’t touched in two years? Get rid of them. I’m of the mind (and you’ll be reading more about this in the coming months) that you should be focused on purchasing fewer high-quality tools instead of a metric diaper load of poor-quality tools.
But that is the subject for another book.
The finished bench is awesome. I know because I have been using it (to the disdain of my 2005 Roubo-style bench) almost exclusively.
Is it worth the trouble? Find out and see. The completed bench will be at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event on June 4-5. And it will be at Woodworking in America on Oct. 1-3. Check it out and let us know what you really think.
Whenever I pore over old woodworking books, drawings and photos, I spend as much time deciphering the background as the foreground. There are always clues hidden in shadow.
Case in point: I have copies of some 19th-century photos from German workshops. In one photo there are about 20 guys standing at their benches, pausing to have their picture taken. Curiously, none of the handplanes are on their sides. All are resting on their soles.
This week I’m building something hanging on the wall of the shop from André Félibien’s “Principes de l’architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture, &c.” (1676-1690). This is the book that we think Joseph Moxon used to make the illustrations in “Mechanick Exercises.” (You can see more of Félibien’s plates in our digital edition of “The Art of Joinery.”)
Félibien calles the device a “press for wood” and in the text gives the thing one line: “Les presses de bois qui se serrent avec des Vis.” Or, roughly translated, a vise for wood that uses screws.
So if you take a look at my terrible scan of Félibien’s plate XXX (above) and squint your eyes like you’ve had one too many glasses of Maderia, then you could guess that Moxon’s engraver took this French press and scabbed it on the front of the bench for Mr. Moxon like so.
Maybe the vise isn’t supposed to be attached like that. Maybe it’s not supposed to be attached at all (see Peter Follansbee’s recent posts on this topic). Now my take is a little different than Peter’s. I just have to check one more thing this week to see if I’m correct.
The morning that I first proposed building a Roubo-style workbench to my co-workers, I was running on about four hours of sleep and five cups of Italian roast coffee.
Earlier that week, I had proposed a cover project for the Autumn 2005 issue of Woodworking Magazine that was not working out. It was a set of contemporary interlocking shelves. I had mocked them up several times using foam-core insulation and presented them to the staff.
No one liked them. Me included.
So the night before our all-staff meeting about that issue of the magazine, I stayed up until 2 a.m. making the first CAD drafts of what would become the workbench I work on today. The staff approved my draft. Not because of its merit, but because of the semi-crazy mountain man look I had in my eye.
Today I embarked on a similar mission to build a super hardcore version of André Roubo’s workbench using the original joints, massive timbers and only hand tools.
Housewright Ron Herman of Antiquity Builders in Columbus, Ohio, delivered the cherry planks to our shop this morning, which I stickered in front of our wood rack. The wood is fairly dry – about 12 percent moisture content – and completely massive. The two boards for the top plank are about 5″ thick and more than 11″ wide each. The leg stock is 6″ square.
That’s the good news. The bad news that is the wood is punky in places, a result of its time on the forest floor or its time in Herman’s tree lot. After the wood showed up, Publisher Steve Shanesy took one look at my mound and just shook his head.
Senior Editor Glen Huey, always the diplomat, asked what I would do if the wood didn’t work out the way I wanted it to do.
Senior Editor Bob Lang – always the Silent Bob – said nothing.
I love it when people tell me I cannot do something. I was told I should leave journalism school. I was told I’d never become editor of Popular Woodworking. I was told I could never drink an entire growler of Bell’s Hopslam IPA (who’s slack-jawed and drooling now?).
And so as I stickered this cherry this afternoon I was already mentally cutting it up to remove the punky places. I was reviewing Roubo’s workbench instructions, which I have committed to memory. And, most importantly, I was reminding myself to pick up some more Italian roast coffee on the way home. It’s going to be a good winter.
We call them “tool pushers” in the collecting world. People who find out what sort of stuff you are interested in and feed you a steady stream of it until your wallet is dry.
One of the worst tool pushers is Slav Jelesijevich, a Chicago area tool collector, cabinetmaker and cat-loving wild man. Get to know Slav just a bit and you’ll receive photos of his cats (some of them in attack mode) and you’ll get leads on old tools that are new in the box. That’s his specialty. I bought a 1970s-era Rockwell band saw from him. In the box. A Work-Mate (in the box). Hammers with 1970s-era Super Bowl tags on them. And too many rasps and files to mention (I guess I just did mention them).
At Woodworking in America, Slav sold a lot of stuff. And a lot of it went home with the other toolmakers on the selling floor with him.
While I was yakking with someone (Harrelson Stanley?) Slav walked by and dropped something in my pocket. Then he disappeared. I knew that whatever it was, it was going to cost me.
It turned out to be something I’ve always wanted: A never-used Millers Falls bench stop. It is the height of gizmo-cool. Sure a simple block of wood can be your planing stop – you Philistine. Or you can get this remarkably sophisticated spring-loaded, quadra-sided piece of tool engineering awesomeness.
Here’s how you install it: Drill two holes in your bench – a 1″ hole inside a 2″ hole. Screw the stop in. You’re done.
Here’s how it works: Loosen the screw and the stop goes loosey and bouncy on a spring. Rotate the head until you have the type of stop you want. There’s a flat stop, a V-shaped slot, one with four big teeth and one with 10 little teeth.
Set the stop at the height you want – anything up to 1-1/8″ and then turn the screw to lock it. Done.
I’ve seen these in old catalogs, but I’ve never seen one in person. And now I own one that’s never been used. But that last part is going to change.