For the face vise, I decided to use the Veritas twin screw. It’s about the same price as wooden screws and I liked the prospect of one-handed operation due to the chain drive. This vise requires two support blocks and a chop. Here are the finished pieces:

I made them out of hard maple laminations of 8/4 boards with 4/4 boards. The finished dimensions were 2.5×3.25×12.375 for the support blocks and 2.5×7.5×34 for the chop. I decided not to do the traditional roundover on the chop and fancy support blocks. I like the minimalistic look of these rectilinear blocks and chop.

Since the holes for the screws needed to be accurate, I used a brand new drill press and a 1.5” Forstner bit. I don’t know why I waited to buy a drill press! It was so much easier than boring that dog hole in the end vise with a brace and bit. I’m glad I got the press because as you can see in the photo above, these pieces required a lot of holes.

In the back of the support blocks, the nuts for the screws were mounted. I found out that the orientation of these nuts matters. If you’re not careful, your screw handles can be off by 90 degrees. But more on that later. The support blocks were attached to the bench using the bolts and round nuts shown below.

Using the brace and 3/8” auger bit, I bored the mounting holes through the workbench top.

On the top side, I counterbored with a 1” Forstner bit.

Here are the mounted support blocks:

Next, I lined up the chop and fully tightened the screws. The first time I did this one handle was pointing east-west and the other north-south. Argh! I decided to fix this by removing one of the nuts and rotating it 90 degrees. I don’t know why the instructions don’t say anything about this. It’s probably prudent to mount the nuts after checking the orientation with the screws fully engaged. After making this correction, the screw handles lined up correctly.

Next I attached the chain to the sprockets. My screws were 24” apart center-to-center so no links needed to be removed from the stock chain.

I added some wear strips to the underside of the bench to keep the front jaw from dropping too much as it gets extended.

After installing the chain cover, I found that the chain was dragging against the cover. So, I had to install one of the chain rollers included with the kit.

After installing that, the vise purred like a lovable little robot. To test out the vise I used it to cut some notches for the shelf that was to go in between the stretchers below. The shelf was just a piece of plywood 19.5×42.5. It fit easily between the twin screws!

I couldn’t do that with my crappy workmate! So cool. It was even cooler clamping the shelf horizontally.

The vise had no problem holding up that piece of plywood! What a grip! The one handed operation of this vise made it easy to hold up the plywood with one hand and crank the vise closed with the other. Sweet! I added the hold down below and finished cutting the notches.

Well, that was the last piece of the Holtzapffel puzzle.

I hope you all enjoyed watching me make my first workbench. I learned so much in building it and really enjoyed the experience. I’m ecstatic at how it turned out and how well it works for so many different tasks.

I have a coffee table I want to make in the remaining summer months before starting a guitar making class at Red Rocks. I look forward to blogging about that class in the fall. Stay tuned!

Since the last time, I flattened the top and applied some Danish oil to the bench. I also installed the end vise and have really enjoyed using it. Here’s a look at the bench while planing the chop for the end vise.

You can also see the slotted tool rack in the upper right from a design in woodworking magazine. This is really a sweet way of holding a bunch of tools. I also plan on adding a chisel shelf and a couple of display shelves for the planes (replacing the bookshelf).

Back to smoothing the end vise chop. I used an old, rusty #3 that I bought from ebay and restored to good working condition. With the new hock iron and chipbreaker, I love using this plane. I also have the veritas bevel-up smoother, but I can see myself reaching for the #3 quite a bit. It just feels good to me.

With the chop smoothed, I clamped it in position with the end vise and laid out the dog hole. I had positioned my dog holes a little closer to the face of the workbench so that they were not in line with the middle of the vise. So I had to position the dog hole in the chop in line with my dog holes.

You can also see in this picture that I made the chop extend out to the right quite a bit. I really like this detail because it allows me to stick up to a 6” wide board on end for dovetailing. With the quick release vise, it is very quick and easy getting a board in that position.

Boring a hole in this hard maple was not easy. After a couple of turns, I decided to try using a cordless drill.

The bit did not budge at all! It was back to the brace and just powering through the chop. I had to use the ratcheting mechanism of the brace, because it was too hard to make a full revolution through the stock.

That was some hard work boring that hole. After this experience, I wasn’t sure how I was going to bore the 1.5” holes that I needed for the twin-screw. So I ended up finally ordering a drill press. I can’t wait to see how it does with the twin-screw holes.

Here’s a pic of the end vise chop in use.

I’m hand jointing one of the boards for the face vise chop since I only have a 6” jointer. The quick release end vise is really a fantastic way to go. I can’t imagine a faster way of getting a board in position to plane (ok, maybe a planing stop). It is also very versatile with the extended chop. Hmmm … maybe I don’t really need that twin-screw face vise?

The finish line is in sight now! Just the face vise and a shelf to go. I feel a little sorry that this project is coming to an end. It has been a challenge and a lot of fun to build. What’ll be my next big project?

The next step was mortising the legs. I laid out the mortises for the long stretchers by laying the ready-made tenons on the legs. I decided to add edge cheeks and shoulders to hide the mortise a bit, so I inset the layout lines for the mortise a half inch in on the top and bottom.

I used a router and a 1/2” up-cut spiral bit to hog out the mortises. I used an edge guide and some clamps as stops. This setup worked ok, but the way my edge guide worked I had to reset my stop clamps when I moved the edge guide in and out. This was a major pain. It also would have been nice to have some way to fine adjust the edge guide. I probably won’t be making 1.25” wide mortises (requiring 3 passes) again any time soon, so I’m not in the market for a new edge guide yet, but I’m sorely tempted.

On the other hand, the shop vac did an incredible job sucking up the waste. The slight loss of visibility was well worth using the shop vac and dust collection attachment. Here’s a picture that I took right after finishing a mortise. No dust! I hadn’t realized that this attachment came with my router until now. What a fantastic attachment.

After routing all the mortises, I squared them up with chisels. Here’s one of the mortises for an end stretcher.

With the mortises made, I made the tenons for the end stretchers and reshaped the tenons for the long stretchers using the dado stack on the table saw. While I was able to make very fine adjustments and creep up on the right depth of cut to fit the mortises, I hated having sawdust thrown back in my face. I quickly learned to put a respirator on when doing this. I don’t know if this will be my preferred way of making tenons. The amount of sawdust created was probably a function of the XXL size of these tenons, so maybe it won’t be as bad on normal sized tenons.

Here’s a picture of the end assemblies and long stretchers. I used the drawboring technique to pin the tenons. I did some practice joints with some store bought dowels and found out that they were oblong and left nasty gaps in the finished joint. I decided to spring for the Lie-Nielsen dowel plate that I saw Mike use in his construction.

Basically you just pound a piece of wood through the hole to make the dowel. Here’s a case where I ended up with a bad dowel. Two faces on the square peg are not being cut by the dowel plate, so it didn’t create a nice round dowel. You really want the wood to ‘bloom’ all around the hole in the dowel plate as you pound the peg through.

Here’s a picture of the biggest mistake I’ve made so far in putting together this bench.

I had to shim the tenon on the bottom there, because as I was fitting the tenon I removed material from the wrong cheek. The really bad thing was that as I was doing this, I kept checking it by reinserting the tenon in the mortise and the faces of the leg and stretcher weren’t flushing up. So I kept removing material from that same cheek! ARGH! I didn’t realize my mistake until I had already removed a little more than a 1/32nd of an inch.

So, with the base together, it was time to attach it to the top. After maneuvering the base to get the front face flush with the edge of the top, I traced out the tenons on the top.

I laid out the mortises on the back side a little oversized to handle wood movement of the top.

Here’s my last mortise. I was glad to be done with routing and chiseling these bad boys.

The moment of truth! Is it going to fit?

Yes! It fits!

Okay, it didn’t really go in all the way the first time. I had to wrestle the base out of the mortises and do some tenon trimming a couple of times before it went in smoothly. But it sure was a good feeling when it all came together!

This was quite an exercise in making mortise and tenon joints. I learned a lot from my mistakes and I’m sure making mortise and tenons for normal sized furniture will be cake compared to this.

First, this took a lot of time. Part of it was my own inefficiency. I started by going diagonally across the surface but it was so uneven that it was just riding on the high boards. A more efficient way to start with the roughness caused by an uneven glue up is to plane lengthwise on the high boards to smooth their edges and once those edges are roughly planed down, then plane diagonally.

I was also taking shavings that were too fine. So I was wasting a lot of strokes. Here are a couple of pictures after I realized the error of my ways and started taking thicker shavings.

It felt great seeing those plumes of wood billowing out of the mouth. The bevel-up jointer really performed well. I did make one change to it though. It came with the plane iron set to a bevel angle of 25 degrees giving an effective angle of 37 degrees with the 12 degree bed. I found this to be too low. I was getting some nasty tearout. I reset the bevel angle to 30 degrees for an effective angle of 42 degrees and didn’t have as many problems with tearout. It wasn’t noticeably more difficult to make my strokes with the higher planing angle.

The one bad thing with using the jointer for this task was that it is heavy. I really wished I had a smaller jack plane to do the initial work on the rough surface. After suffering through this, I bought a used Stanley #5 (along with a #3) on ebay to try to do some restoration on. I’ll probably start another series of posts on that process.

So, once I had the bottom of the top roughly flattened, I squared off one end with a circular saw. That took one pass from one side and then a pass on the other side. The two cuts didn’t meet perfectly, so I had a lot of end grain planing to do with a block plane.

Next, I turned my attention to fitting the end vise. I’m using a 10.5” quick release vise in this position. I made a notch for it in the glue-up process and it only needed a little paring to fit the vise.

I couldn’t wait to see how the vise worked so I decided to mount it. I used a piece of plywood as a spacer to get the top of the vise to sit about 1/8” below the benchtop. I then used a brace and a 5/8” speedbor bit to make the holes for the 1/2”x5” bolts.

I stopped just when it punctured the surface on the other side.

This was my first real application of using a brace and bit and it went very quickly. The bit lived up to its name; it drilled through in no time. It does leave a rough hole though, so I used a different kind of bit for the dog holes.

Flipping the top over, I used the small puncture as a guide for a 1 1/2” Forstner bit to counterbore for the bolt head and washer.

My experience with this bit was not as happy as it tended to drift in its hole. This may have been because it was following the larger pilot hole left by the 5/8” bit.

Here’s what the counterbores looked like with bolts and washers in them. You can see the tearout in the lower right from my first hole. I used blue tape to try to prevent that on the left side.

Finally, the mounted end vise!

Having gained some confidence with the brace and bit, I decided to make some dog holes. Here are some tools that I found helpful in doing this.

Yes, that’s a mitten! When I was doing the holes for the vise, my left hand would go numb from my chin pressing down on it and cutting off the circulation. My chin was a little sore too. So, I tried putting on my mitten to give some padding to my chin and it worked great!

Here’s how I used the square to keep the bit straight up and down. I didn’t have any problem keeping it straight laterally (left-right). I did tend to be a little too far forward though on top. So by trying to keep the top edge of the square aligned with the screw head on the brace, I was able to straighten out in the forward-backward plane.

I made dog holes about 5” in from the edge and at an interval of 4”. I wanted the dog holes in the middle of a board and the next board over felt a little too far from the edge for me. Even though the dog holes aren’t in line with the center of the vise, I don’t think it should cause any problem.

Here are some of the dog holes and also some holes that I made for holdfasts. You can see the roughly planed top. I just made a few passes to get it “kind-of” flat.

I still have to cut off the vise end of the bench top, but this is starting to look like a real bench now!

Joint, joint, rip, plane, repeat. That’s all there is to milling up the boards. Actually, I did joint, joint, joint, ..., rip, rip, rip, ..., plane, plane, plane, plane, ....

A couple of problems arose for me while doing this. I lost one board because it turned out I had tapered one edge so severely on the jointer that the max width I could get was 3 1/8”. All the other boards were ripped to 3 1/4”. It also turned out that the total thickness of the boards that I had came out to about 21”. I didn’t get as much thickness out of the boards as I had hoped.

Here are some images from the glue up:

I did four subassemblies of four boards each. I left the front face board unglued, because I had this idea to avoid having to notch a lot of waste from one of the ends to flush the end vise. The idea is to glue up boards to match the width of the end vise, clean cut the ends of these boards, and then offset the other boards to create the notch. It turned out that the first two subassemblies glued up to 10.5” wide. That’s exactly the width of the end vise! Cool!

Now I just had to clean cut the ends of those boards. Can my trusty miter saw handle the 3 1/4” thick, 10.5” wide slab?

Yes it can!

That’s the biggest chunk of wood I’ve cut with that thing.

So, back to that problem of only having a 21” wide top. While moving that big slab around, I accidentally dinged it and left a little nick in the wood. Douglas fir is pretty “dentable”. It’s pretty low on the Janka scale. I decided to add something harder for the front and back face to protect those edges a bit.

I was originally going to use ash and had to pick some up anyway for the vise chops. On Saturday, I went to the Hardwood Emporium in Golden for the first time. The owner, Jay, is a great guy. I can’t recommend that place highly enough. Well, Jay didn’t have 8/4 ash, so I ended up splurging on 8/4 hard maple. The 9” 10 ft. and 7” 9 ft. boards that I bought cost about the same as all of the fir! But I should end up with enough leftovers to make some legs for a night stand and a table.

This was my first experience with hard maple. It’s hard and heavy! Trying to joint an edge so I could rip it was tough especially with that mobile base on the jointer and the uneven garage floor which made it a little less stable than ideal. The jointer was none too happy on the first couple of passes. I had left the depth of cut at closer to 1/16” that I was using with the fir. I backed off on the depth of cut and the jointer didn’t whine as much. I hadn’t realized how good I had it with the Douglas fir!

I was amazed at how much more thickness I got out of that rough lumber. Close to 1 3/4”. Here they make their appearance in the final glue-up:

Yes, I ended up doing this on my kitchen floor! It’s the biggest flatish surface I have in my house. Here’s a picture from the other end that better shows the end vise notch idea:

I should only have to pare back a little to accommodate the end vise.

Well, that’s all for now. Here’s a teaser for the next segment:

The raggedy, uneven top.

And the magical tool that will conquer it.

Here are all of the pieces for the four legs milled up.

You can see some dark streaks in these pieces. Those are where I ran into sap pockets in the wood. I don’t know if that’s bad or not, but it is annoying.

I think this is my second or third attempt at laminating. My first attempt was a big gluey mess. I used way too much glue and the pieces slid all over the place as I clamped them down. This shot was taken after some clean up. I waited about an hour after clamping and came back with the crappy plane iron that came with my Stanley block plane. It works great for popping off the beads of squeeze-out.

I used all my Bessey clamps for a pair of legs. It’s kind of crazy using 24” and 40” clamps for something that’s under 4 inches thick. After this, I ordered the Jet 12” clamps. This is probably clamping overkill but since the jaws didn’t reach all the way across the 5 inch wide legs, I wanted to clamp on both sides.

After these dried, I cleaned up the edges with the jointer. That’s when this happened:

This little piece got chipped out. Luckily, I found it on the floor and I can glue it back in later.

Here are the laminated and jointed legs:

One of the legs has non-square sides, so I’ll have to go back and clean that one up. I also think the legs are going to be too tall for me. I’m going to cut them down about an inch. There’s still quite a bit of work to do on these legs: chamfering, smoothing, mortising, and drilling dog holes. But it’s time to move on to the top. Those are the boards for the top underneath the legs. More on that next time!

In the mean time, I spent some time adding dust collection to the shop and also built this sweet sawbench/sawhorse from Chris Schwarz's design.

This gave me some good practice milling up the lumber and also with some finishing. I used the natural Watco Danish oil on the douglas fir and I really like the warmth it added to the wood. I’m planning on using it to finish the workbench.

I started working on the bench a week ago and have made quite a bit of progress on the legs and top. Before showing that, I thought I’d take you on a little shop tour.

It all starts with the jointer. I got one with a 56” bed which has been very useful in milling up the top boards. I don’t really like the mobile base, but I need it to keep using this second bay for parking a car. I’ve also found that I don’t like these pusher pads. For the fir they were ok, but for moving rough 8/4 hard maple, they were useless.

Here’s the planer and the first use of the sawbench and sawhorse as a planer stand. I made the crude looking dust collection hood and it works amazingly well.

Here’s the table saw. The outfeed table is the second thing that I built after a mobile clamp cabinet. Someday I’ll add edging to the melamine and route slots for a miter gauge. The trash can on the left has one of those chip separator lids. It works great. I’ve found that I need to empty it when it gets about 1/3 full. After that, everything heads to the impeller.

I love this sliding compound miter saw. I plan on building it a nice cabinet home one of these days.

Here’s my set of clamps and the first project that I built, the mobile clamp cabinet. There are some more larger quik clamps on the back. I just got the Jet 12” clamps after using the huge bessey clamps for the legs. I like the Jet clamps much better than the Bessey’s. There more comfortable to use and there’s none of those shocks when a Bessey’s handle is flying down the shaft. I should have gone with the Jets when I first started buying clamps.

And finallly, here’s one tool that I’ve found incredibly useful so far. A 72” straight edge made from a jointed hard maple board. Highly recommended for building your top!

Alright, I’m going to finish gluing up the top now. I’ll try to post another entry on the legs this evening. Ciao.

I took some video of Chris’s hand plane talk. It’s a little shaky (done with a little Flip Ultra), but I think the message comes across. Here’s the first part on the fore plane and jointer plane.

The second part covers the smoothing plane, high angle infill smoother, and scraper.

In the third part he addresses some myths about orienting boards in a panel and never setting your planes down on the sole.

In this video, he discusses bevel-up versus bevel-down planes.

As an encore, he showed how to use the reflection in your saw blade to improve your cuts.

April 11 – April 12, 2008
Furniture Making Workshops
1774 W. Lunt Avenue- Chicago, IL
(J. Miller Handcrafted Furniture)

Hours: Friday, 4/11 noon-6pm
and Saturday 4/12 10am-5pm

Guest Demonstrators include: Christopher Schwarz, John Economaki, Jeff Miller and
Thomas Lie-Nielsen.

It happens to be about five minutes from my sister’s condo, so I’m planning to attend on Friday.

Have any of you been to one of these? How was it?