Reply To: Workbench design
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Just some personal thoughts/opinions, not scientific or dogmatic or anything… It’s your bench and your choices, so please take these in a helpful spirit
1. The ideal bench height is personal preference based on your height and the type of work you want to do and sometimes best found through practical trial and correction. You could consider making the bench to the tallest you consider reasonable as you can always shorten the legs afterwards by cutting from the bottom if you find the bench too high when working. It’s probably more difficult to gracefully add on height after the fact. This concept may mean placing the lowest rail a little higher than you would otherwise choose.
2. I am more in favour of designs that have the vice inboard of the leg as I would be worried about a bench like this tipping or moving from the weight of the vice plus project, plus hand tool efforts. Maybe that’s not going to be a problem if there is a lot of weight in/on the bench or it’s secured to a wall or something like that.
3. From the picture, the legs look to be through-tenoned into the benchtop and there may not be another top cross rail/bearer? If the legs are through-tenoned only then honestly it would probably still be pretty solid, but if the legs were housed into the apron and/or glued/screwed/bolted to the apron that might make it even more rigid?
4. Underbench storage. Have you thought what you may do with the large space under the bench? If there is any chance that you may want to store anything heavy that has wheels/castors, then you may want to reconsider having all four sides access blocked by the low rails.