Questions about workbench design and glue-ups
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1 October 2014 at 5:18 pm #118779
I’m in the design phase of building Paul’s workbench that’s shown on YouTube and have a couple of questions. Here’s my set-up: I’m using this bench in a spare bedroom in my house, so space is limited. I’m only going to be using it for small projects and joinery. I have a much bigger bench outside that I use for doing more rugged work. The entire bench is going to be 2′-6″ x 5′-0″ x 3′-0″. The bench top is going to be 2″ thick and the apron will be 8″ wide. Also, I’m adding a light-duty 6″ Bessey woodworking vise to one face.
Will this be beefy enough to work on effectively?
Since I’m on a VERY tight budget, I’m using pallet wood to make this bench. That being said, I’m forced to use different lengths of wood (and different species; oak and pine, mainly) to make up the bench top.
Is there a special way I need to do the glue-up to make it all come out correctly?
I can provide a set of plans to show my entire design, if needed.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions 🙂
George, my bench is smaller than yours with the exception of the bench top. I used 2×4 so the top is around 3 inches thick (due to me not knowing what square and flat was at the time I built it and having trued it up once I knew what square and flat actually meant 😉
I would go with a wider apron, it really ties everything together.
As far as gluing up the top, I always suggest to use clamping cauls on the ends and in the middle to prevent the ends from stair casing on you during that slippery process. Just use some wax paper to prevent you gluing the cauls to your bench top.
2 October 2014 at 6:25 am #118810Thanks, Dave. It’s kind of funny, though. I’ve used cauls on a few of my glue-ups already on other projects, but didn’t know they were called cauls. I saw another woodworker use them years ago and just followed his example. I didn’t know about the slight curve, though. I just placed boards across the tabletop and weighted them down with bricks, stones and slabs of marble.
My initial idea was to dowel pin the endgrains of the shorter boards together to make all the 5′ boards I need for the glue-up. Is this a bad idea, beyond just taking a lot of time?
For my 2 cents, i would increase the apron as Dave suggested, but moreso you will just have to use a very sharp plane when flattening as you may have more reversing grain issues, i would set up a # 4 scrub if you can, then a very sharp smoother.mine is 5′ also, with 3″top all pine/ spruce/ whitewood, and i wish it had more weight, so perhaps whayever oak you might have will help with that.
As far as the dowels go, I would go with lap joints to glue the shorts together, it’s a more solid joint where you could actually work with the joined board if needed i.e planing. A Doweled joint end to end is likely to break just by handling it I think.
i think you could get away without joining the shorts together tho, just make sure they are supported with the cauls during glue up otherwise they might pop up. Put the shorts on the inside and have full length boards on the outside.
2 October 2014 at 8:08 pm #118816Thanks for the help, you guys! I’ll update my progress as soon as there is some. 😀
11 October 2014 at 7:12 am #119360It sure is 🙂 Since I’ve only done small glue-ups in the past, I really learned a lot doing this one. I should have done this in sections to make it come out better. There were several small gaps and a few slips caused by the glue on the first couple of boards sitting too long. Took a little bit to plane it all down, but it looks good. What’s funny is that the side I had planned to be the top had all the gaps, so I went and filled them before planing. While I was having lunch afterwards, I reviewed Paul’s YouTUbe video and he says to plane the bottom first. So I flipped it over to check the “bottom” and saw hardly any gaps at all! So I inadvertently did the right thing all along, as far as planing 🙂 It’s funny how the universe works sometimes 🙂 I got the other benchtop done today minus planing, and tomorrow I hope to have the wellboard and legs started.
16 October 2014 at 1:32 am #119579After a few days and many hours of planing, here are all the pieces of my workbench, ready to be assembled. I planned on having the bench be 24″ wide, but forgot that adding the aprons will add 3″, so now it’s roughly 27″. Oh, well, a little extra width won’t hurt 😀 Tomorrow I start the joinery.
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You must be logged in to view attached files.21 October 2014 at 6:00 am #119737I just discovered that the wood for my bench legs is mesquite. Before I realized what it was, I decided to keep a rather attractive looking knot in one of the legs. I will NEVER make that mistake again. It took me about 2-2 1/2 hours to chop the mortise that is next to the knot. The other mortises I chopped only took about 30 minutes each. That is the hardest wood I have worked with so far. The chips were so dense that I thought I was going to break a finger trying to dig them out with my chisel. Finally resorted to using a brad point drill bit to chew up the chips enough to get them out. I’ll have some more pics up tomorrow.
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