Today I turned the first four legs for the low Roman workbench but I left my lathe set up because I might need to turn four more tomorrow.
While most images I’ve come across of Roman workbenches show them made with four legs and with staked construction, there is one image from Herculaneum that looks a lot like there are eight legs. The image below is actually an 18th-century drawing of a painting from that doomed city that has deteriorated – all we have left is this image (plus a host of wrongly interpreted images).
Suzanne Ellison and I are fairly convinced this image is accurate for a variety of reasons that I’ll discuss in the forthcoming book. But even if the 18th-century image is accurate, a few experts have suggested that the Roman image it is based on is inaccurate.
It’s a bit of a hall of mirrors to discuss. But the bottom line is that some people think that the Herculaneum image actually depicts a work surface on top of two four-legged sawhorses. I tend to disagree. But there is no way to settle the issue.
So what I’m planning on doing is making the bench with four legs, like this image from Pompeii.
Then I’m going to work with the bench and see if I think it needs four more legs to be robust enough for operations such as hand mortising.
So stay tuned.
These four legs feature 4”-long tenons that are 1-3/4” in diameter. I roughed them out on the lathe and then shaved and scraped them to the finished shape. I like the process and the finished texture.
I’m more or less following the script of The Naked Woodworker for my workbench, making adjustments as necessary to accommodate the differences in sizes and shapes of lumber that are available to me here in Ecuador. I used the two-bucket sawbench illustrated in my prior post to build a “real” Mike Siemsen-style sawbench, and then used that one to build a second, twin (fraternal) sawbench.
Workbench material
I’ve been amassing the materials for the workbench over the past few days, most recently with a trip to a different lumber vendor, Maderas La Morita.
Their sign could use a little work…A fraction of the lumber for sale at La Morita, several different species
I ran into a bit of a language difficulty while there, not understanding the difference between tabla and tablon (roughly the difference between “board” and “plank” in English). I would have thought that the two words were fairly interchangeable, but apparently not so. Anyway, I got confused, which made the person trying to sell me the wood confused, which made me even more confused. But it all worked out in the end.
I was looking for some 3/4″ pine, which they did not have. “Not a problem! We’ll just make some.” (Loose translation.)
And so they did. They took a thick pine slab and resawed it for me on the spot:
Changing out the blade on the tablesaw; the one that was mounted wasn’t quite big enough to span half the width of the plankA couple of passes through the thickness planer, and we’re good to go
The pine lumber that I have is surface planed and jointed on one edge, but rough on the other. The leg assemblies of the Naked workbench require the two sides of the leg plank to be (or be made to be) reasonably parallel, which would be easy to do if I had a workbench, which I don’t. So I screwed two pieces of scrap to a 2×6, so that I could wedge a board into the tapered gap between the scraps:
My first vise
The improvised vise holds the board surprisingly securely, and I only crashed my plane into the wall once.
The Kywi that I’ve been buying most of my tools and hardware from has a decent selection of screws for wood and sheet metal, but hardly any bolts at all, so I wasn’t able to get the necessary carriage bolts there. But have no fear, because just down the road from our house in Tumbaco is La Casa del Perno (House of Bolts), and they had just what I needed.
All the bolts you want, all the time
Elsewhere on the tools and hardware front, I previously mentioned that I might buy another saw and make it a dedicated rip saw. I did just that, and now you can see why I was hesitant to buy it earlier:
Shark? Maybe. Saw? Definitely not.
I’m clearly going to have to spend a bunch of quality time with the saw to get the teeth into reasonable shape, but so it goes. I did discover something that I had somehow missed on previous trips:
Saw sets. In blister packs.
Knowing that a saw set is available to me makes me less reluctant to fiddle with the set of the saws that I have.
Here I’m traversing the underside of the benchtop.
I only want to work each surface of this benchtop once. The slab weighs enough (approximately 115 pounds) that I have to struggle with it to get it in and out of the vise and onto the benchtop.
So every move with the slab is planned with care so I don’t end up injured or (at best) embarrassed at having to ask a friend to help me get the benchtop off the floor.
Today I dressed the two broad faces of the benchtop: the underside and the benchtop itself. Both have to be fairly flat and free of twist in my experience. Of course, this slab turned out to be a weird one. Typically the bark side of a slab will be concave across its width, and the heart side will be convex. This slab was reversed.
So I started on the convex face. Normally when I dress a rough convex face I remove the hump in the middle using with-the-grain strokes with my jack. But because I had a lot of wood to remove (about a quarter of a thumb), I used a different tactic. I traversed the hump alone at first and stayed away from the long edges of the benchtop. Traversing allowed me to take a bigger bite with the jack plane.
The winding sticks showed the slab was twisted significantly.
Once the hump was gone, I checked the top for twist. It was indeed twisted. So I used my jack plane to work away the two high corners, which were diagonal from one another.
When the underside was flat (according to the winding sticks), I dressed the entire underside of the top with the jack to leave a consistent and tidy (if scalloped) surface.
Then I flipped the benchtop over to work on the concave side.
Here I’ve darkened the two high corners of this slab. I worked away the two high corners until all four corners were in the same plane.
Because I knew this surface was also twisted, I began working away the two high corners straightaway. After bringing all the corners into the same plane, I dressed the surface with a jack. I’ll probably dress it with the jointer in the morning and leave it like that until after assembly – that’s when I’ll clean up the leg joints protruding through the benchtop and tooth the surface with a toothing plane.
I also managed to rough out the legs on the band saw today and hope to turn them on the lathe tomorrow.
If this sounds like a lot of work, it’s not. I have logged only two full hours of shop time. How much more time I’ll log will be determined by whether I decide to build an opossum or an arachnid.
— Christopher Schwarz
The almost-finished underside of the benchtop. I love the furrowed surface and wouldn’t trade it for anything smoother.
Almost two years ago Chris sent me a pre-publication copy of “The Book of Plates” and gave me free reign to color, cut-out and otherwise manipulate anything I found in the plates. Yesterday I started work on the index for “Roubo on Furniture” and now get to read the descriptions of each scene, tool and work method in the plates. Most of the plates that I transformed into dioramas and collages are from the furniture book and seeing them again was a reunion with old friends.
The plates have tremendous detail but having the matching text is like have the sound turned on. Part of Plate 4 is a description of proper storage of wood and protection from the elements. Roubo provides meticulous instruction on stacking the wood and how to achieve the angled “rain diverters” at the top of each pile.
Adding dimension and color to Plate 4.
In preparation for this indexing assignment I pulled my special china pattern out of storage. I like my china pattern to match the book.
Later in the week I’ll revive the Birds of Roubo and the trash-talking Chairs of Roubo.
This afternoon I got a good start on my first Roman workbench – a knee-high bench with almost no workholding, aside from holes for pegs or holdfasts.
I’m building it using a red oak top from Will Myers, who dried the slab in his homemade kiln in North Carolina. The legs are some white oak stock that is sold at the lumberyard for making rustic mantles. (I was going to instead use some firewood I have in my shop, but that firewood is actually going into two upcoming commissioned chairs.)
The real fun part of the project is the measurement system. Thanks to Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney at burn-heart.com, I have a Roman ruler to guide me as I design and build these two workbenches. I’m using his Cubitus Ruler, which combines several Roman systems onto one pretty stick.
So here is the cutting list for this first Roman workbench:
1 benchtop, measuring 3.4 thumbs x 14 thumbs x 4.9 cubits (or 87.8 thumbs)
4 legs, measuring 2.2 thumbs x 2.2 thumbs x 1.25 cubits (or 21.3 thumbs)
Before you do the math, just think of the cubit as the distance from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger. And the thumb as the length of the second segment of your thumb. That’s accurate enough.
Today I dressed the front edge of benchtop with my jointer plane, making sure it was square to the benchtop (the benchtop is the heart side of the slab, FYI). Then I marked the final width of the benchtop using a large square – my panel gauge is in my other shop.
That’s when I found that I had to remove almost 1/2 thumb of wood in places to make the front edge and back edge parallel.
I looked for my hatchet. Dangit. It’s also in my other shop.
So I decided to traverse the edge with my jack plane. After marking the final width of the benchtop, I use my jack to create a chamfer on the corner that touched the line that represented the final width of the benchtop. The chamfer acted as gauge – as the chamfer disappeared I knew I was closer to my finished width. It also protected the corner from spelching during the traversing.
This dodge worked surprisingly well.
Tomorrow I’ll dress the benchtop and start shaping the legs.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. The book “Roman Workbenches” is unlikely to have any photos because we are printing it via letterpress, so I’m not sure why I’m documenting every step. Old habits die hard, I suppose.
