| Building a Traditional Workbench | |||
By Keith S. Rucker
Introduction
If you are going to use hand tools in your woodworking, perhaps the most important tool to have is not the tools themselves but a good bench to do your work on. When I first started to set up my shop, I had only been out of school for a little over a year, been married a little less than a year and had just bought a new home. To help spell my situation out, we were poor. Even though the finances were not the best in the world, I began to accumulate a few basic tools and began making some of the much needed furniture in my new home. My first workbench was pretty simple. When we first moved into our new home, the previous owners had left behind a crudely made puppet stage, which was actually just several 2x4's screwed together and painted white. Having no need for a puppet stage in my new "shop" (the two car garage on the front of my house), I disassembled the puppet stage and reassembled the lumber into the frame of a bench. Nothing fancy here mind you, I just made a basic frame and put it all together with screws. The top was made from some scrap 2x6's that were in the burn pile of a new house that was being built down the street from mine (I did ask the contractor before taking them). The 2x6's were again screwed down top and presto, I had a bench. A couple of scrap pieces of plywood made a shelf underneath to stack junk on. A couple of years later, a front vise was bought and added to the bench.
It was not a pretty bench and it was not really a great bench, but it was the only bench I had. As my woodworking improved and I started using more and more hand tools, I started to realize that my thrown together bench was not good enough. Planing was particularly a pain. First, there was no good way to hold a board while planing. I screwed a couple of stops on the end of the bench for boards to hold against while planing but there was nothing on the other side to hold it tight. And, when I was planing, the whole bench racked back and forth resulting in much wasted energy. The more work I did on this bench the more I realized I needed a new one.
Shortly before my daughter was born (July 1997), I ordered a copy of "The Workbench Book" by Scott Landis. The book arrived just a few days before my daughter did so as I was spending a lot of time in the hospital waiting to go home with my new little bundle of joy, I spent many an hour reading my new book (Hannah, my newborn daughter, spent most of this time sleeping anyway so I had to do something to keep my busy). I must have read that entire book cover to cover at least twice before going home.
I spent the next three years thinking about my bench and saving what I could so that I could build one right. After three years of planning, I finally came up with a bench I think I will like. During that time, I had the opportunity to actually do work on several different types of benches to see what I liked and didn't like. The result of all of my pondering on the subject was to build a pretty traditional bench. The following collection of pages is a continuing saga of the step by stop process I went though to get it done. As I go along, I will discuss what I have learned along the way so that if you ever decide to build a bench, hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.
To see the documentation of the process of building this bench, please go to the Outline. To Go from page to page in order, just click the "Next Page" link at the top and bottom of each page.
If you are new to workbenches and not sure what all of the features of a traditional workbench are, I strongly recommend that you take a look at Bob Key's page on an Introduction to Workbenches. Bob also has a couple of nice benches on his site with good documentation as well. If you are thinking that you really like my bench but want to start out with one that is a lot simpler (and cheaper) to build but still a great bench, you might also want to take a look at Bob and Dave's Good, Fast and Cheap Bench.
NOTE:
This entire work on Building a Traditional Workbench can be downloaded in Adobe PDF format if you would like to have a printer friendly version. The PDF file will print in booklet form where graphics will not fall on two pages. This version will also take less paper to print if you so desire.
Workbench.pdf - 60 pages, 1.53 MB
Thanks to Giovanni Da Re, the entire set of plans has now been translated into Italian and avaliable for download as well. The Italian version of the plans can be obtaind here: ItalianWorkbench.pdf.
To view and print these files you will need the Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. If you do not already have it, download
below by clicking on the Adobe Acrobat graphic.
e-mail: krucker@friendlycity.net
Copyright © 2000 by Keith S. Rucker,
All rights reserved.
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