I didn’t take as many pictures of the endcaps and the aprons as I did other parts of the project, but I can describe the process a little to make up for it. The front and back aprons were attached with a spline made from some scrap douglas fir from some other project that I had lying around. I put my slot cutting bit into my router and set the router for the deepest depth that I could and then routed a slot down the front and back of the bench. I then repeated this process on the back apron’s inside side. I later did the same with the front apron’s inside side. I didn’t put the front apron on right away as I wanted to match it to the length of the tail vise and I wasn’t perfectly sure of how long the vise was going to be. I hate it when I make an assumption about a measurement and then I ruin a good piece of wood by cutting it too short, so I made the decision to just fit pieces as I came to them. In the last post I showed the tenon being cut into the ends of the tabletop. I cut the mortises in the endcaps using my dado blade on the table saw. I then glued the apron and endcap on the tail vise end and back so that I could put on the tail vise. This picture is a look at what it looks like after that glueup.

The next picture misses some of the process as well. I glued on a backer piece to screw the tail vise plate into, but forgot to take a picture. I did however take a picture of the plate in place with the basic body of the tail vise in the picture as well. You can also see the slot that I routed for the top plate of the tail vise. I had purchased and sharpened the new chisels by this time and got to use them on the fine-tuning of that slot. Wow, this was one of the first times I was ever able to use a high quality hand tool, and I am completely sold. Never will I buy low quality hand tools again. The Ashley Iles chisels are awesome, and I have to say I really do love my Worksharp 3000 as well. I am not a very patient sharpener, so the Worksharp definitely made my sharpening experience more pleasant.

Next, I fine-tuned the squareness of the sliding plates on the tail vise and then milled up the pieces for one of the ends and for where the dog holes were going to go. I had waited to this point to decide whether or not I was going to use square traditional dogs or the round ones. I finally decided to go with the round ones. I really like the Veritas 3/4” brass dogs, so I decided that I would use those. With that decision made, I started the glueup process knowing that I could just drill the dog holes when everything was installed.

Now, here’s where I forgot to take some pictures…..When I cut the dado for the other endcap, there was some cleaning up to do in the mortise and fine tuning to make it fit the tenon nicely. This involved some chiseling. The irony of the situation, is that I was building this bench so that I could secure workpieces more safely and allow me to do more hand tool work than my previous setup would allow. Unfortunately, with the bench not done, I couldn’t secure the piece I was working on very well and had to hold it down somehow. I stupidly thought, “Oh, why don’t I hold it down with my left hand, while I use my right hand to do the chiseling.” Rather than clamp the piece to the tabletop, I just dove right into chiseling. It was going so fine until I pushed too hard on the chisel and it sliced into my left index finger near the last knuckle. Ouch! A couple of fine and appropriate expletives later, I watched the it to see how bad it was going to be. It started bleeding pretty quickly and luckily I had a paper towel close at hand, and my wife was not home from work yet. I wasn’t done with what I was doing, and a wife watching me clean my wound would force me to go to the hospital…that couldn’t happen, I needed to get the mortise finished and attach the endcap to the end and glue it up! I quickly washed the wound and clumsily attached a dressing and went back out into the shop. I finished the glueup just as the garage door opened and my wife walked in. She, of course, had that look on her face. The one that says, “What have you done now? Do you need to go get stitched up?” By this time, the bleeding had mostly stopped under the pressure of the dressing, but I needed a little help getting a new dressing on, so I had her help me with it this time, but it was more or less fine, so I didn’t go to the hospital. I just didn’t think to take pictures. It is all healed up right now, but I definitely lost a tiny bit of feeling in the tip of my finger and have a nifty little scar to show for it.

On to the bench. I got the rest of the apron done, and decided at this point that I wanted to add a little bit more heft to the front apron and the endcaps. I went around to my local hardwood suppliers and nobody had any 8/4 sapele and I didn’t want to spend the extra money (I knew I should have bought that extra piece when it was in stock! doh!) to ship any to me, so I added some Douglas fir, and while it looked a little funky at first I think it actually looks pretty cool, now. This next picture is of the face vise installation. I added a pretty hefty block underneath the table to screw the vise in. It is attached with lag bolts and glue and it is not coming off.

The next picture is where I am gluing on another piece to make the face vise just a little deeper. You can also see the bulk of the face vise after rough cutting the round onto it. I later took the belt sander to it smooth it out. I also wanted to go with wooden dowels for the handles of the vises and there is the dowel that I made for that vise. Each of the vises was a little bit of a pain in th a** for their handles. The holes in the vises were a little bit non standard and it took me a while to come up with a way to size some dowels with what I had, but I got it done with the belt sander eventually. Also in the picture is my Incra miter jig for the table saw. That thing rocks!

And now to the last picture for the day. I spent a great deal of time sanding everything down at this point. I had drilled all the holes for the dog strips and the vises. Everything fit just right and the vises were working. I repaired some of the dings in the table top that inevitably happened and inserted shims and flush cut them in the mortises that needed them. I sanded everything to 120/150 to get it ready for finishing which will be the focus of the next post and then the last post should be about the cabinet that I still haven’t built, but should be working on this weekend. This picture was definitely a high point in my life as a woodworker because it was really the first major piece that I got to this point. Little rolling cabinets for tools are one thing, but this could have been a piece of furniture in our house (not that my wife or I would want a workbench in the house, but you never know :) ).

Au revoir!

Thanks for following along.

I have two older brothers and while we nearly drove our mother to distraction with our hijinks, we spent much of our early years beating on each other in some way, shape or form. I was 6 years behind them, so I definitely took the brunt of the beating. At least until I grew taller and stronger than them. I definitely gave back as good as I got, but in the process I learned to ignore a few things. One of those things is the pain from minor injuries. Whenever I am playing sports, doing manual labor, or working in the shop, I find myself with little cuts and scrapes that I have no ideas about where I received them. If I actually notice that I am bleeding, I might put a bandaid on if it is enough that it might get on the work piece, but otherwise I tend to just forget about them. It drives my wife nuts. I walk in from the shop and sit down to talk or do something and I have a cut on my hands or leg and she looks down and sees me oozing and I get the look and the command, “Go wash that off and put a bandage on it!” and I respond, “Huh? What?” and look around and, “Oh, how did I get that?” I guess I just have to do a visual of myself periodically in the shop, but so far, I have been my lucky self. I haven’t lopped anything off (Though I have been close), and I continue to try to be safe. I try to compensate for these tendencies at the power tools, because I know what can happen, but it is the little things that always get to me. Oh well, on to the blog.

The next few pictures are of the top being glued up. The base just made a perfect, well, base to do these clamp and glue ups. You can see the cauls I used to make sure things were even. I had those covered in packing tape on the glue side. This glue up procedure was a little bit of a pain in the ass because of the space constraints in my shop while building this bench. I am in the process of rearranging everything and building things to free up space and of course this was the first major step, so there are all sorts of workstations and old benches and tools and just general junk all over the place. Kaleo’s workshop video about the creation of his workshop makes a funny statement about that. “We should save this box of doodads for the future. Where should we put it? In the garage, of course.” Hopefully I will be able to make order out of chaos and actually please my wife at the same time, but we shall see.

Each of the two glued up sections were small enough to go through the planer and were thus planed down to the same thickness, eliminating any inconsistencies at that point. There were then glued and clamped together. In the next picture, you can see the 3×5 cards that I put under the middle of the cauls to make sure pressure was applied in the middle as well.

After the top was done, I had to square off the ends with my circular saw. At the time, I was using a piece of angle aluminum that was pretty sturdy, but eventually I ended up purchasing one of those clamp straight edges that have a low profile for just that purpose. I like it much better. The blue tape is to control any splintering, which it did.

Here I have the top with its tenon routed out for the eventual endcaps. This was the same process as with the circular saw, but with my router instead and I had to flip the top to do the bottom.

The next picture is the sapele all marked up for the endcaps, front and back aprons, and the tail vise. I originally thought I had enough for the front vise, too, but I miscalculated and didn’t have enough. By the time I realized this mistake, both my Woodcraft and the wholesale lumber yard, Mt. Storm, had no more 8/4 sapele lumber left. I also feel that I should have designed the aprons to be a little wider top to bottom and hence a change in plans happened later when I was taking care of the vises.

This brought me to the point where I would need to put on the tail vise. That scared me, because up until this point, it didn’t matter if I got a measurement slightly wrong, I could go back and fix it somehow, but now I was to a point where I would have to scrap a lot in order to fix a mistake. I didn’t want to do that, so I built a mockup of the tail vise out of scraps and got all the measurements from that. What a good idea that was! In the long run, the tail vise worked out just right, and I can easily say that the mock up was the reason.

The next picture is the jig I made to drill out the holes for the dowel pegs to secure the benchtop to the base. I live in the Bay Area region of California, and while we have humidity swings, they are not nearly as bad as some parts of the US. Still, I put three dowels on the foot sections and three holes in the top. The outside holes were larger to account for wood movement and the center dowel holes were the locating holes.

I think that’s about it for now. I will add more about the aprons, endcaps and vises later. Next weekend I will be building the cabinet for underneath the bench top. It will be somewhat based on the ideas presented in a Fine Woodworking article about the same.

In the next two photos, I have marked out the mortises for the stretchers and you can see the preformed mortises in the feet and bench supports for the preformed tenons on the legs.

Those mortises in the legs had to be hogged out, and I sure wasn’t comfortable doing the whole mortise with my skills and the not so great Irwin chisels I had, so I hogged out the waste with my drill press and a Forstner bit.

The next shot is of one of my chisels sticking out of the mortise as I am squaring it up. I know I have said a few times that I don’t really like these chisels, but only for the reason that I ended up purchasing a set of Ashley Iles chisels for myself as a Christmas present and boy are they so much nicer. It may also have helped that I got a Worksharp shortly after and my chisels (all of them, including the Irwins) are so much sharper that they all cut better.

Here are the Ashley Iles Chisels. So nice and comfortable for my large hands and I love the weight and they cut like a dream.

Here the legs are being dryfit. If you look really close at the connection between leg and feet and support, you can see that the tenons were just a little long and that there is a slight gap. This was intended so that I could flush trim them later and be sure I had not made a measuring error. The next photo after that is the feet after they had been rounded over and had the relief cut on the bottom.

Oops, now I realize that I didn’t take any pictures while gluing up the leg sections, but you can take it from me that I glued them together. The next and last picture for this installment will be the glue up of the base. Since I have a dearth of clamps that are over four feet long (let’s just say that I have Zero), I had to do some creative clamping with my long boys both on top and bottom to make sure that everything was square.

That should just about do it for this post. On to the benchtop in a couple of days.

Ciao!

This entry is going to be about the next stage of this process of building a workbench. At some point after I had milled up the many pieces for the top, I decided that I did not just want it to be Douglas Fir all the way across the top. I just thought it might look a little too bland. I think it was around the time I was doing the initial glueeup of the top 6” sections.

You can see if you look closely in the next photo that I didn’t have them all completely the same height. I did this because I intended to run them through the planer as sections. I think that in retrospect that I would have liked to have had the top a little thicker and that I might have put more thought into this particular part rather than what I did. It did end up working out, but I still would have liked it thicker.

The next picture shows all four of the top sections glued up and planed.

Like I said before, I wanted a little more visual appeal, and I had seen a photo in one or both of the books I was reading that had a bench with accent strips in a darker wood with that darker wood also being the apron around the edges. I had noticed that my local Woodcraft had some nice 8/4 Sapele and thought that the dark brown Mahogany color would look good around all of the Douglas Fir. I also thought that the vises would be a little bit more effective with the denser wood as the main wood. Here is a picture of the 3/4” wide sections that I put in between the 6” Douglas Fir chunks.

This next photo is the first of many things that taught me how to better tuneup my machines. In this case, the planer. I have the Delta 13” planer, and while I love it, when I first got it, and when I was first using it, there was definitely some snipe involved in all of my workpieces. You will notice in the bottom right hand corner of the picture on the end of one of the Douglas Fir sections that there was some definite snipe. I loved the look of the Sapele with the Fir, but I ended up having the cut a little more of the ends off because of the Snipe than I had wanted to. My Father-in-Law was over for dinner one night and he noticed the snipe and asked what it was. I told him, but it irked me that I had to deal with it. I eventually went through the manual for the planer reading every word and then checked a few other sites and realized that if you cant the tables up just a fraction that almost, if not all, of the snipe goes away. One major woodworking machine tuned up.

Since I had the chunks for the top about done, I figured I would want to start working on the base so that I could have somewhere to put the top once I got it all glued up. This whole process involved a great deal of moving things around for each subsection of the whole workbench to be built with the size constraints of my garage (and the incredibly lame placement of our chimney, which by the way, doesn’t work because it is cracked in several places, so it uses up 10 square feet of shop space and wall in a place that is very inconvenient) Here are the blanks for the legs, feet, and top of the base. You might notice that I have a couple of extra blanks, but the way the cutlist worked, I had a few extra pieces that wouldn’t go anywhere else, so I milled a couple of extra in case.

The next few pictures are of the glueup of the legs with their readymade tenons. I think I will leave the finetuning of the legs, mortising the feet and top and the glue up of the base for the next entry. Thanks for reading.



Oh, and I almost forgot, along the way (since I drew it out so long), I was able to purchase and receive a few tools as gifts that definitely helped out in the process. The first of these that was truly significant was the new Starrett 12” square that I picked up. My old one was a cheapie from HD and it turned out that it wasn’t all that square to begin with and was the reason that some of my earlier stuff wasn’t quite square.
Here is a picture of the new square…well worth the extra money, that is for sure.

Some of the things that I thought about while mulling the idea of building my workbench were: Cost—Could I afford to buy one of the commercial benches? The answer, probably not all at once. I can easily stretch the cost of something over a long period of time, as I am pretty patient, but plunking that much money down for something that would help me learn if I built it, didn’t make much sense to me. I thought I would be better off building the darn thing on my own and learning a few things along the way. Plus, I didn’t think I could get the initial cost of a large woodworking bench past my wife at the time, whereas I could sneak the relatively minor purchases of things by her over the long haul (We both have our vices, woodworking for me, and shoes and clothes for her. We just have that great unspoken agreement to keep our habits within limits LOL)

Space—How would one of these benches work in my limited shop? I love the look of the Frank Klauz benches, but that extended vise on the front just wouldn’t work for me. I had to decide on a different design. That different design ended up being the Dunbar bench for the most part. I made some modifications along the way, but overall, I liked the versatility of having a face vise that was pretty hefty and the an end vise in the same mold.

*Wood—What kind of wood would I be building this bench out of? While I ultimately may end up building a new bench down the line out of maple or beech, I thought the learning process and my skill level would not allow me to spend that much money on lumber that I would be just hacking at. Some day maybe, but not now. I decided to go with Douglas Fir, as it is readily available and cheap. Once I had made that decision, it was simply a matter of purchasing the best cheap lumber.

Sometime last summer, in between a vacation of a lifetime to Europe with my wife, and the beginning of the new school year, I purchased the best 2”x12”s that I could find at my local Home Depot (whatever one may say about HD, they have cheap lumber and it is just around the block from my home, so it is my easiest alternative in this area). As I knew I didn’t have a great deal of time to work in the shop and the lumber was still a little wet, I decided to lay them out and sticker them for a while until I could begin working on them later in the fall.

That time came in October when I had an extra day off. I pulled the boards out and chalked them up the way I wanted to rough cut them.

After having drawn out my rough outlines to get the top pieces out of these boards with the best grain and least number of knots, I rough cut the pieces for the top.

After I rough cut them that day, I jointed and planed them down to the sizes they would need to be for glue up in sections. I only have a 13” planer, so I would be gluing them up in approximately 6” sections, so I laid them out for best effect before I started gluing them up.

I think that’s about it for tonight, I will add more in a day or two.

Yesterday I spent the day making sawdust out of some nice looking Padauk and Maple. Here is the 8/4 board of Padauk as it sits on my jointer and some of the bright bright orange chips that came out of it.

Here is the beautiful looking wood after it has been jointed a little. I must say I am really happy with the grain and the color, though I think I will be staining it to get a more reddish color, but I haven’t totally made up my mind on that.

I was following the dimensions from my sketchup drawing, and I mindlessly milled all of my stock down to rough and then final dimensions. I had also glued up the bottom and the top so that I could plane them down to final thickness and cut them to their final dimensions

By the time I was done, I had come to the conclusion that I had made a mistake in my initial drawing. I had originally intended the front/back and sides of the case to be 3/8” thick, and when I got out to the shop and made my maple that thick, I realized that it just wouldn’t do for what I wanted. This basically made me go to bed a little bit unhappy with myself. I didn’t really want to go spend any significant amount of money on some more maple, but I just didn’t think that the 3/” size of the front would work on an almost 21” box. As I was drifting off to sleep, I remembered that I had recently made a purchase of a couple board feet of curly maple that was just shy of 4/4 thick. I thought I just might have enough of that to make the four pieces that I needed, and that definitely allowed me to sleep a little easier.

Unfortunately, I just didn’t have enough for all four pieces. I milled up two of them with the intention of making a trip to my Woodcraft store this morning after it opened to pick up some more. Lo and behold, they had enough for me to make my last two pieces and have some left over. I wish that I hadn’t had to spend the money, but I think the look will be better with the curly maple and a 1/2” thickness. Now I have all the pieces milled to their correct final size and I can get started on the other work. I had to go run some errands, so I put off the cutting for a bit.

When I returned home, I started work on the trays to hold the chips. Here is where the Wood Whisperer comes in. His idea of clamping the two trays together and using a forstner bit to the diameter of the chips was very useful. Of course, my chips are 1 9/16” in diameter and anyone who knows hole saws and forstner bits, or at least their normal sizes knows that most stores don’t stock this particular size, but I was in luck, Woodcraft had the exact size I needed and it was actually in stock at the store.

Here is the first blank clamped up and the story stick of dimensions on it waiting for me to start drilling.

Here is me starting drilling the first hole:

Here is the first hole finished:

Which by the way wasn’t as easy as I had expected. My drill press only has somewhere around a 2” quill distance, and of course the blanks are 3 1/2” thick which makes each hole a little bit of a pain, but overall it came out just peachy as you can see by this picture of some poker chips stacked in the hole.

Success! Now for 7 more holes. I am writing this in between holes as the Wood Whisperer wisely suggested letting the bit cool down between the drilling of each hole. I don’t know how much more of the cutting I will do tonight, but I will be sure to take more pictures and post tomorrow.

My buds and wife and I have been playing poker on a semi-regular basis, and for whatever reason, it seems like we bought the chips. We got them on sale and they are in those spinning octagons.

Those are fine if they stay on a shelf and only get brought out at home. The problem is that we end up going over to the other players’ houses for the most part so that no one has to host the game all the time. This leads to us bringing the two spindles over in their cardboard boxes and the chips inevitably fall all over the place and that just drives me nuts. So, I says to myself, “Self, you need to make some cool looking box to hold the chips. This is a perfect opportunity to build your skills in wood and on your computer.” I spent a long time designing the case after looking all over the place for examples (there are very few of those out there, by the way). Part of the length of time had to do with how busy I was at the end of the school year (I am a High school teacher by day, and the student government advisor to boot so the end of the school year is my busiest time of year and I had very little time in the shop in April and May). I was also delayed in the building of this by a month long vacation to Europe with my wife. We hit 6 countries and had a blast. If you want to read our travel journal (my wife did all the work on this, she loves the Yahoo travel), just click on the link below

http://travel.yahoo.com/trip-view-1085877-europe_adventure;_ylt=AtnsNYud_Q6_g053B26K9_KfItAF

If that doesn’t work, just go to the travel section of Yahoo.com and search for Team VT, that’s us.

Well, now that I have cleaned up the sketchup file and put dimensions on it for my own use, I thought I would actually start a blog on building this poker chip case. The textures in the picture are just approximations of what I wanted it to look like. I have a chunk of 8/4 maple that I plan on resawing into the sides, but I hadn’t actually bought the wood for the contrasting color until just recently. I found some nice Padauk with a good reddish color to use for the contrasting color. The colors of the school that I work at are Red and White and since most of the people who play poker with us are teachers at my school, I thought it would be appropriate to try to get something close.

I didn’t feel up to actually drawing in the hardware and handle yet, but I intend to pick something up when I get to that point. I have also been toying with hand chopping dovetails instead of the finger joints that I had originally intended. We shall see, I need to practice those before I make that decision…though I did just pick up a nice Japanese saw or two at Wood craft to cut dovetails…hmmm.

I will be milling up the stock in the next couple of days and I will post pictures as I go as I think I am about at the place where I can actually blog about my work. It also helps that I have all this free time, at least until the beginning of the school year.

I am currently working on a frame for my wife. Hopefully we will take some pictures in Europe this summer so that we can find one to blow up and put in this frame when I finish it.

I am also in the conceptual stages for a briefcase-like case for the poker chips that our group of friends use during our monthly attempt to pass money around. :) I know that the chips are 1-9/16” in diameter and that I would like to either make the case with my dovetail jig, or the finger jig that I built over spring break. I want it to be very simple otherwise. If anyone has any ideas for me on this, or knows of pictures of something like this, I would be grateful if you could forward those to me.

I am also going to build myself a new podium for the class room this summer, and am starting to look for plans or concepts about that as well.