Building workbenches can be addictive. This is already the third and won’t be the last. Number 1 I showed previously, number 2 is a not-so-sturdy copy of number 1 build from reclaimed lumber in a hurry and now number 3.

Since in the workshop there already is this workbench #2, ready to serve as assembly table and for light (read machine) work, (see picture 3, in the back) the #3 shall focus on handplaning, sawing, chopping.

I’ve spent countless hours researching LJ, reading internet entries, books (e.g. the one by C. Schwarz) and thinking about my way to a workbench. Quite contrary to the modells by Schwarz and many others, I decided for asymmetry – what do you need similar sides for?

The lumber I used is entirely reclaimed lumber from a major storm damage to my parents holiday house, so I had no choice concerning sizes, quantity or species. I believe its all spruce. That’s what we use in Germany for construction work.

I often clamp boards to the front of the bench, so this bench had to be an apron-style bench (Schwarz calls them “English”). The front legs have to be straight and flush with the bench, while regarding the back legs I decided for an angled design (known from many traditional European benches, e.g. Spanish ones) allowing for a rather slim benchtop (only about 30 cm / 12” wide) and still a stable footprint. I also simply find it classy.

The strap reinforcing the top is not as crucial to this design as it is to my other designs, since this bench is completely glued, but it helped tremendously with assembly (I had no helper), is a very useful place to hang some clamps or other tools and does provide the force to keep the legs close together. In combination with the upper ring of boards it prevents rocking.

To add the icing to the cake I also installed a tool rack. The contruction of this tool rack had to ensure that the tool rack can quickly be moved flush with the front for front clamping and flat on the bottom rack (which does not have boards on it for lack of time, maybe next summer) when clamping to the benchtop is needed.

That I used a strap (which is actually the very first strap I ever bought at the age of 17 preparing to go to a boarding school in Italy) to adjust the angle of tool rack is no wonder to those who followed my oeuvre.

The tool rack takes the tools I most commonly use: #4 plane, low angle block plane, 4 chisels, pencils, combination square, dozuki and kataba. It has a magnet batten to keep whatever is ferromagnetic.

I had not yet a lot of time testing the bench since my holidays are over and the bench stays at my parents holiday house. See you next summer, #3!

This was my first project where I extensively used the plug-it-&-strap-it-concept. The bench is made from construction grade timber with OSB panels resting in grooves. The top is a 24 mm baltic birch multiple ply board, the most expensive part of the whole bench.

The construction relies on the I-beam concept: the panels join two rails/posts in way forming an I-beam, provided there is some force holding it together. And that is provide by the straps. As long as the panels do not buckle out of plane, they can take the weight of a Soviet tank.

The bench is constructed in such that all rails and posts have their joinery cut into them (a kataba job), grooves routed where needed and then the appropriate rails, posts and panels get pulled together with the web clamps. A long strap runs the whole length right under the top and back under the bottom side rails. The top is screwed on using M8-machine screws. Two leg vises and a back vise complete the set-up.

At present the back vise is at the left hand side. All it would take to put it on the right hand side is to screw of the top, loosen the web clamps and reassemble the rails and accordingly. I am right-handed, but for some reason or another work always on the left side of the bench.

The bottom shelve is only half – that way my shop vac fits nicely (second picture). The front rail is flush with the top and commonly used as a clamping surface.

The panels may be a sore sight for a bench traditionalist – but boy, do they make the bench rigid! And at a very low cost.

Of course I keep on dreaming about building the next, truly nice bench, but this one works. And as already many other people noticed: it takes a bench to build a bench. You can see it from the fact, that the lumber of this bench is not planed: I did not have a bench to plane the lumber. It just does not work on a workmate. But it does work on a bench like this (picture 5).

As with most of my projects, there are plans available.

Cheers, Justus

Big box stores in Germany usually don’t stock hardwoods and one of the few exceptions to the rule that you only get spruce is douglas fir for use in verandas. You can buy posts 70×45 mm, battens 48×28 mm and riffled boards 120×28 mm, length up to 2.5 m. So that was the material to chose from.

Like in most of my projects, the joinery was again chosen to be 3D-puzzle-like, i.e. all boards are shaped and then only plugged together. The force necessary to keep everything connected and rock solid is provided by two straps wrapped around the bed, providing on the same time a strip of colour. The web clamp locks are hidden behind the front piece / visible from the back only.

Since I don’t own a lathe and precut cylindrical rods are pretty expensive around here, the rods are 12 mm copper plumbing pipes. In my opinion they make a nice contrast to the douglas fir. They are just inserted into the holes drilled into the bed rails and squeak when turned – quite to the joy of the toddler, a bit to our annoyance when he is awake and playing at night.

The oblique-angle joinery used to connect the top rails was chosen to be easily cut – but proved to be difficult to get exact enough. I wouldn’t do it that way again. The straight angle joinery on the bottom proved to be more apt in the end. In the end there are few examples of oblique angle joineries known – it dawns on me why.

When I carried it home rom my studio I appreciated the wisdom to make it a knock-down bed – it it quite heavy and would have never fitted a small Euro-sized car.

Again, a beginner’s project. Detailled plans (sketchup) available.

Cheers, Justus

The cliché lumberjock builds workbenches, jigs and baby cradles – I line up perfectly.

The shape of the cradle is inspired by bauhaus concepts, the front reminds of the trochoid runner of a wankel engine. The formality of the design is balanced by a crown on the head piece.

This baby cradle is made from baltic birch plywood (12 mm if I recall correctly – at present it serves at a friend of mine only to move on to my brother as soon as his youngest will be born) and coated with pigmented oil. The boards were bought cut to size at a local bigbox store (that’s the way you typically buy baltic birch here in Germany if you are not a professional) and cut to shape with a jig saw.

The sheets are connected with mortise-and-tenon joinery (cut with a router), though no glue is used – the cradle is strapped together using the web clamp typical for my projects. The same straps can then be used to hold the packet together when the baby moves on the toddler bed (third picture) and the cradle may be shipped to more recent parents.

The cut-outs in the sides are for ventilation since there are hints that insufficient ventilation may be one of the causes for SIDS.

The keel has little structural importance, but makes for a more pleasant appearance and lowers the center of gravity – quite important for a cradle. For very heavy babys (ours was not) additional weight could by added to the keel. The cut-out handles on the sides and fronts have proven to be very useful – we used to carry the baby together with the cradle everyday from the living to the sleeping room. One just has to be cautious of doors – this cradle is as wide as it is long!

This project is suitable for beginners with next to no equipment – just contact me for the plans (sketchup) if you want to build one (exploded view shown in fourth picture),

Cheers, Justus

This rocking dino was made as a christmas present for my then 11 month old toddler. I could have taken longer, he is not yet able to rock the dino.

The design of the dino was drawn by myself with inspirations from several pictures I had seen on the web. Thanks go out to the unknown authors who shared their projects. The body is made of slices of 18 mm-thick commercial glued wood (spruce I believe) I had left over from other projects. Templates for the head-&-neck, tail, main body (sides), front and hind legs were cut from HD fiber boards with a scroll saw. The forms were roughed out with a jig saw and finalized against the template with a flush trimming bit using the router table I devised for this project.

http://lumberjocks.com/projects/11511

The same router table also served for the rounding of the contours with a round-over bit. Square or round edges make quite a difference in appearance here.

The rails are made from solid spruce, the outer rails being cut from three pieces and joined with biscuits before being glued to the the inner rails. This way the grain follows the curvature in the outer rails and is less likely to break. The front mitre is hardly visible in the picture, but the back mitre shows. The biscuits just help the handling, the strength comes from the long-grain glueing of the rails together.

The dino is strapped to its fundament via the blue web clamp that has become my trademark allowing easy assembly/disassembly. The strap at the same time fixes the saddle I have sawn from nylon canvas and stuffed with PU cold foam. The load of the strap is taken by a black strap running on the bottom of the saddle and stitched to the sides. The rings connecting the two straps are links of a stainless steel chain. (The lines of countersunk holes on the sides of the fundament were drilled before I decided for the strap construction – they have no meaning no longer)

To ensure an upright assembly the dino body was hung from an improvised portal crane, adjusted to level and only then the legs were glued and clamped to the body.

The eyes are made from plastic door stoppers. The cap – an important safety feature on a wild ride – was crotcheted by my mother-in-law.

I chose blue for the dino because a tiny blue plastic dino played a major role in my childhood. This dino was also my first major spray finishing job. I had to turn a part of my rather tiny shop into a spraying cabinat for that purpose (last picture).

I have not made detailled plans for this project, but anyone interested may please contact me for details.

Cheers, Justus

One of the projects that are a MUST for any LumberJock in the short or long run is a router table. A nice one, to be proud of. Just look around at LumberJocks. There are so many of them. But then, there may be a point in life where you just need one – and don’t have the time or money for a beauty.

I just needed one for my next project and came up with this design.

Take one of those cheapo wannabe workmates – if you spend more than 20 € you got robbed – , put your router on top, take a pen and draw around the base plate – it is advisable to open the jaws about 2 cm beforehand. The jigsaw will make quick work of the mdf top – some sanding, clamp in your router and the router table is almost ready.

For the micro-adjustable fence screw a batten to one of the benchdogs you got with the workmate and drill a a hole for a long screw or threaded rod into a second one – see picture two. I have not yet been in need to make a clearance hole in the fence, so far the table has mainly seen flush trimming.

Another five bucks are needed for a web clamp to act as the router lift. Wrap it around the router, and pull it tight untill you have the bit somewhere close to where you want it. Close that lever on your router that locks it in position, remove the strap and finetune the height with the inbuild finetuning.

The nicest thing about this construction is, that the workmate still works for what I usually use them – as something like a sawhorse. I would not want to consider them workbenches (though I had to, prior to my building a real one).

And yes, the router table is a bit low. You can’t get everything for 30 € / 30 min.

The concept for this cutting board is derived from the live-long quest for a simple separation of goodies and waste. By using two plastic containers you can simply shovel the waste into the right one and the goodies into the left one (or vice versa, your choice). The containers simply go into the dishwasher. The craftmanship here leaves room for improvement: You could use end grain boards, invent some more elaborate methods of removing the containers rather than my simple lifting the entire board (I use the inside rim of the top board as handle). The second picture shows just that while the third is an inverted view. The cutting board is gkued from three commercially glued panels, top is beech, the two bottom ones are some local softwood (fir/spruce). The trick was to find containers whose height matches the combined height of two panels.

I am thrilled to see whether my idea is taken up by the community.

Ever been bothered by wielding annyingly long pipe or bar clamps? Do you also always seem to have the wrong size of clamps? How cool would it be to have a web clamp that actually clamps like a pipe clamp?

The main problem is, that the arms of the pipe clamp do have to sustain some torque, i.e. the pipe should not bend. The straps of a web clamp bend with no effort at all.

The thought did not leave me and after some less succesful prototypes I came up with this version:

The trick is in the shape of the batten where the strap is running around – think of the triangular sections as if they were wheels where the strap in wound on. At university we learned, that the friction put onto a wheel by a rope depends on the tension of the rope and the angle of loop – twice around would be 720° – as an example. By making the strap taking a longer way at the bottom and putting the lock such that the moving strap is pointing upwards, pulling the web together creates the torque necessary to keep the arms on the object to be clamped.

If you need low to medium clamping pressure on very large or otherwise cumbersome objects, this may be your tool.

Glad to have proven my point I rewarded myself with a pair of Bessey parallel clamps.