Reply To: Workbench Questions
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You can drill the knots out first if using knotty pine – not necessarily the full depth of the timber, just enough to take them below the level you expect the surface to finish at. Saves a lot of wear on the blade, though you do still have to contend with the unruly grain that surrounds the knots. When you’re done you can glue a plug into the holes, Paul shows how to do this in Tool Chest ep 13 right at the start. That’s what I would do if I were a novice woodworker approaching a first project.
I have not found Beech especially difficult to work by hand, though had I ever tried to get a large flat surface from it I might have a different opinion. It has a quality I can only describe being a bit “chewy” – it sort of drags on the plane a bit, resists your effort more than some other woods. It is a dense grained wood so I put it down to that. Its continued use for benchtops by all the major European bench producers past and present attests to its suitability for that purpose, though they of course will just whizz it through a few machines for guaranteed results. For the amateur on a limited budget the stakes are somewhat higher.
Birch is a mystery to me, what we see of it in the UK is generally either plywood or still part of a tree. I have had a small section once and, as you’ve suggested, it seemed pretty similar to Beech to work. My understanding is that it is not especially stable, possibly because the trees don’t get very wide so all the wood comes from close to the centre. I’d steer clear of it.
Paul addresses the issue of bowing in his video, to paraphrase: “If you can push the gaps closed by hand, it’s flat enough”. You can clamp out quite dramatic bowing in softwoods, though this only builds tension into the top which can cause distortion issues as the wood moves with the seasons. If you can’t take a full-length shaving you’re also unlikely to get close glue joints.
My bench is a little longer but probably weighs the same as yours will, when I built it I added stretchers on the long sides for rigidity and to support a shelf. As well as dust, this collects heavy stuff like power tools and I almost never notice any movement.
Matt