I have the bench top to the basic shape I want, including dado-ing out some chisel and saw holders.

I started to visualize the base of the bench—I like to get exact measurements on each part as they relate to others, so I don’t really start out with a precise cut list.

I didn’t want to put the skirt on the bench top until I had the base set up. In order to start setting up the base, I need to start cutting some mortise and tenon joints. I have a crap set of chisels that also double as screw drivers, paint priers, door stops, and throwing knives. I also have a great set of swiss chisels that would be perfect for working in oak. Only, I don’t have a mallet to hit them with. Ok, so I went about making a mallet.

Some blood. Some sweat. But fine. In the process of making the mallet, the whole shop became a mess. Everything was spraying dust everywhere. I couldn’t find tools. What I needed for this small space, I decided, was a set of little workbenches. Yes, that’s right, in order to build a work bench I would first need to build several other workbenches. This was like the process of building the mallet—I used my nice swiss chisels, but I had nothing to hit them with, because I needed a mallet.

Picked up a utility cart for $10 at a garage sale.

Built a quick and dirty miter-saw station / compressor home.

Built most of an out-feed table / home for a heavy chest of pipe-fitting tools that is always in the way.

Meanwhile my thein dust separator continues to languish half finished.

As does my half-repaired planer-jointer (waiting for new brushes to come in the mail).

I also am tired of using my tiny construction table saw, especially when there is a 220 3 hp delta sitting in my garage unused (no 220 power nearby). My dad asked me not to try and hook it up—can you see the thick cables snaking into the house, down the stairs, and into the breaker box? So I thought I would make the best of it and move the table saw (with it’s giant fence) from the middle of the garage to the side of the garage. At the same time, I decided to steal the fence and set up something useable in a table saw / router station combo. But like many of this week’s projects, it’s only half done.

I still need to join the top rail and the two side posts as well as, you know, make the additional table portions.

Anyway, the garage is a mess, I shaved lots of yaks, and my work bench is no closer than it was a week ago. Yikes. Maybe some good will come of this, but I doubt it.

I’m a big fan of this guy. I don’t know if it is just that I am getting (relatively) older, but I remember pulling out my dad’s real tools since I was 5 or 6 and taking them into the sandbox or the back field or wherever. So at ages 9 and 11, I figured they should start a project that is hard for them.

They both thought of projects they wanted to do: a pencil holder and a nightstand for a doll. Seven hours later we emerged. All I did was cut wood on the table saw. I made the girls find wood from the scrap pile, lay out their project, figure out how they wanted to attach things, how to hold down a workpiece, drill the holes, screw things together, and sand everything. It took 6 hours. And a lot of patience. But as they were getting in the van to go home, I overheard one say “check it out, I MADE THIS!”

I turned my roubo-workbench-in-progress upside down and put it outside for the little one. He spent a lot of the time actually doing stuff. I’m convinced kids even as young as 2-3 can tell what is a real tool. Real tools do something—when you file the edge of the board, shavings come off.

Laying out the project. I was running short on safety glasses, so one looks like a pilot.

Cleaning up. The younger one was awesome. The older one kept disappearing.

Finished projects!

First things first, I put the machine back together, except for the switch. I originally planned on using a voltage tester with live current, but I was nervous about that. The voltage tests that I had (read, that I stole from my dad’s tool box) looked old or cheap or both. But I found a video online to explain how to check circuits for resistance to see whether they are opened or closed.

The basic concept is you use an multi-meter and measure the resistance. If the two points aren’t connected, you get a “1” or an open message—there is a high level of resistance. If the two points you touch are connected, you get a “0” or closed message—there is virtually no resistance.

First, find multimeter.

Next, switch to measuring ohms and test multi-meter. When the two leads are touching, ohms (the green scale at the top) gets buried on the right—no resistance. When it’s open, it’s buried on the left—high resistance.

Unplug the machine from all equipment, we just want to test which circuits are connected, not the power in those circuits. I balled tinfoil around the plug end of the machine to complete the circuit on the plug side.

Examine switch. Black, white, and green come into the switch—black is usually hot, white neutral, green ground. Two yellows come out from the motor—one connects with white / neutral and the other connects to the other side of the power switch.

Now the testing.

Switch set to “off”, touch black and white wires with probes—> “0”—> so the plug isn’t shorted anywhere.
Switch set to “on”, touch black and white wires with probes—> “0”—> doesn’t really tell me any new information
Switch set to “off”, touch white neutral from power cord and yellow hot coming out of the switch—> “1”—> no power is making it through the switch, as it should be.
Switch set to “on”, touch white neutral from power cord and yellow hot coming out of the switch—> “0”—> switch did it’s job and power can flow through it.

I don’t know what it will tell me, but then I did the following two:

Switch set to “off”, touch yellow wire at switch and other yellow (normally connected to neutral)—“1”—> there isn’t a completed circuit.
Switch set to “on”, touch yellow wire at switch and other yellow (normally connected to neutral)—“1”—> there still isn’t a completed circuit.

I don’t know if their should be a completed circuit on the motor side when it is not running.

Anyway, it looks like I should investigate the brushes and see if I can find a screw extractor.

The offending bench top (now laminated together). The planer broke before I could smooth out some of the dips from my poor feeding technique. I needed to use a router to fine-tune the bench top anyway, so I figured I would take care of it then.

The poor machine that I fear I may have ruined. Hitachi F1000A. Purchased back in the early 1990s, it has been a workhorse for 20 years. During that time, it never seemed to fail on him. I would like to think that I just happened to be using it when it failed and not that my using it broke it. But I can’t be sure about it.

The planer and jointer blades were not in great shape. You can see from the pictures there are nicks, dings, rust, and general malaise. I thought that might be relevant because a dull blade may put too much pressure on the electric motor?

I knew that 8” of oak would be very taxing on this planer. It’s not quite a home depot version but it isn’t a massive industrial beast either. I tried to take precautions about how I used it. I snuck up on the depth very, very slowly. I fed it through front and back so that the blade didn’t touch at all. Then I snuck up a little more and shaved it close enough to only remove some hardened glue that was raised up from the surface. Then I would move 1/4 to 1/2 turn of the crank and do one side, flip the piece end for end (in case the sharper side of the blade could get something that the duller side couldn’t), flip the piece over, and then swap end for end again. After that process, I would crank down another 1/4 to 1/2 crank and repeat the process. Here’s what 1/4 turn and 1/2 turn look like (turning two quarters, start, +1/4 turn, +1/4 turn)

I began to notice some weird sounds coming from planer—it didn’t sound as high pitched as normal. But it was only slightly off so I just chalked it up to my forgetting what the planer sounds like one day to the next. But the piece was having problems feeding as well—going much slower than normal. Again I chalked that up to the wide oak—of course it wouldn’t just zip through it, it would have to work a bit. On what was my last past through, the feed slowed down significantly and the motor audibly bogged down a lot. I was on the opposite side of the planer at the time ready to catch the board and so rather than lowering the table to reduce the pressure, I tried to just help feed the last 6” of board through as quickly as possible. As I was doing that, I noticed that there was an extra amount of blue arcing illuminating the motor housing. (There always seems to be a little bit of blue lightning fuzz going on in there, but this was much more).

I pulled the wood out and left the machine running. It now sounded significantly different from before—and a bit worrying. I shut it down and let it rest for a few minutes. I don’t know if that actually would make any difference, but I did it anyway. After it had rested, I flipped it on again to see if the sound came back. But nothing happened—no click, whirl, nothing. I thought the breaker may have tripped, but I plugged in the shop vac and it worked fine. There was power to the machine, just nothing was happening.

I closed up shop for the night and headed into bed to check what the forums said about this machine in particular, about burned up planers in general, or about burned up motors even more generally. I clicked through the top 15 results on google.

I couldn’t find anything specific about this problem. I did find an instruction manual as well as a number of engineering diagrams with exploded views of the machine.

So after a very basic review of electric motors 101 courtesy of wikipedia, I think it could be one (or several) of three problems.

—failed switch
—failed brushes
—siezed bearings

Of course, siezed bearings could lead to failed brushes. I guess my main question is how to go about identifying the exact problem.

I started removing easy pieces to get at the machine.

Looks like no one has serviced this machine in a long time. May be indicative of neglect in other areas (maybe gummed up rollers, which were causing overload issues for the motor?)

Vacuumed out.

Dammit. I stripped this screw, despite taking precautions otherwise—give the screws a light tap with a hammer to break any seal, giving the space between the washer and the screw head a light tap with a cold steel chisel to see if I could break any seal. I’ll go find my screw extractor set and order a new one from Gainger or McMaster-Carr.

But my main questions are these:

1) If I plug in the cord, flip the switch on, and test the back of that switch with a current tester, should I be able to tell if the switch blew out? My thinking is that within that swtich their might also be a breaker / regulator. If it is the kind that heats up and melts, then all I would have to do would be to install a new switch. Do people know, generally, if the switch is a part that can / will fail? Is it likely?

2) Is there a motor controller or overload relay somewhere else in the machine? Again, this is courtesy of wikipedia, but it seems likely that there would be some sort of break between the switch and the full power of the motor. Any thoughts on where to look for that.

3) Reading other random sites, it seems fairly simple to replace burned brushes with new ones. Is this the case? Any special place to order new brushes? Another McMaster Carr job?

4) If the bearings have seized, is this something that is fixable.

5) Other. Something else might be at play that I have no idea about.

If worse comes to worse, I will contact a repair guy. But I am pretty sure that even a visit to come look at the problem will soak up the rest of the budget that I have for the workbench. Any thoughts / help would be welcomed.

First, find some wood. I scoured my local classifieds, but out in the West I feel like there is not as much cheap hardwood as there is on the East. Still, I found 3 oak beams for about $10 each and the guy threw in 2 pine 8×8’s as well.

There are plenty of problems with the wood, but it was the right price. One beam cleaned up well. The other two need a lot of help. Perhaps this will just add character to my bench.

Those beams turned out to not provide enough good faces to build something decent so I decided to use them to laminate into a bench top. Went out to the classifieds again and found a guy selling oak he “inherited from a friend” for $2.50 a bd ft. I picked up about $90 worth.

Some bowing, twisting, and cracking to deal with.

I picked these up at night with only my iphone to provide light in the barn where they were stored. I guess I should have looked a little more closely.

But in the end, there are some decent faces to work with.

Second, I need some tools. Picked up 12 3/4” pipe clamps from amazon for $55 w/ free shipping. Then bought 4 10’ lengths of black pipe at home depot for around $13 a piece. They cut them and threaded all of the ends for free, which I felt like was a good deal. All told $55 + $52 = $107 doesn’t seem that bad for a set of sturdy pipe clamps, but it wasn’t as much of a deal as I thought it would be.

My dad has a 12 volt dewalt drill and an 18 volt. Both have 2 batteries each. None of the batteries hold any charge—zero. I don’t know why he kept them around. I went to home depot and bought a $90 replacement battery to see if it was really the battery or the motor. The new battery worked fine. I returned it and started looking on the classifieds for something that would do the trick. The nice thing about the recent building bust is that it looks like a lot of people are getting rid of their construction tools. I found an 18 volt dewalt with 2 batteries that hold a decent charge for $35. I thought that was a deal. Anyway, it would be easier to build some jigs now that I have a working screw gun.

Cleaning up the lumber was a bit of a chore. So far, I have spent most of my time just trying to get straight boards. And ripping 2” oak on a construction table saw isn’t exactly speedy.

I could only get so much progress using a powered planer. I had to fall back to a nice jointer hand plane to finish truing up the boards.

I couldn’t get the jointer side of hitachi planer-jointer to do very much on the oak edges. The machine is 20 years old and for a number of years it sat in a warehouse untouched but also not very well cared for. I think it was a combination of tough 2” oak and a very dull blade. So I made a jig to try and set in a few boards at a time to use the planer. I could never get enough clamping force with the jig for it to work—the autofeeder kept pulling the boards out of the jig and I am sure that the rough plywood bottom didn’t help things either. In the end, I just used two clamps and sent boards through two at a time. It didn’t give me a square board, but it was uniformly un-square. After I got to that point, I swapped one board end for end. Now I had two parallelogram-shaped beams. I put the acute edges of each board towards the bottom outside. Now I essentially had a flat surface—two point rails. I sent them through again until it flattened the top. Flipped it, flattened the bottom. Now all the boards are square!

I made a full-size mockup on my make-shift assembly table (a table saw covered with a piece of particle board). It will deviate a bit from this design.

Starting on fitting my pieces of junk oak together to see if I can get something decent out of it. I think using biscuits to laminate the pieces is a bit overkill. However, my thought was that this oak is in pretty bad shape. Despite a lot of work, some pieces were still bowed, twisted, and cracked. I could continue to try to clean up the lumber, but at some point I would only get toothpicks out of those big beams. I decided to commit a grave sin and count on clamps to true up skewed boards.

Dry fit everything to check that I didn’t make any biscuiting mistakes.

Begin the glue-up!

Gluing them in pairs first so that I can run them through the planer a few more times. I won’t be able to plane the completed top (too wide) but I thought I would try to get close with some extra prep.

Next I tried to stabilize the wood on the cheap. Parts of the lumber have huge cracks, gaps, and cavities. I thought about epoxy, but it was too expensive. I would be better off just buying better lumber to begin with. So instead, even though wood glue has very poor gap-filling abilities, I poured the stuff on. My thought was that at some point, all of these cracks will get small enough to where a strong bond may occur (maybe deep in the beam). Having at least a little bit of strength there would be better than nothing. So I filled every crack with glue and then re-planed them 4-5 days later.

Clamping round 2.

The result of clamping round 3.

Some of my hardware came in the mail from Lee Valley. I’m going to use the single tail vise bench screw for a leg vise on the side of the table and use the traditional vise as an end vise. It seems like a leg vise has a lot going for it. Mostly I was trying to make it easy for my dad to hold pieces to do dovetails and other close work. Getting a decent vise that had space in between the two rails to hold a piece of wood was too expensive. I pretty much eliminated all twin screw vises and anything with a quick release. These two were reasonable—$40 and $60, I think. If there was one place I wanted to spend a little money, it was here. Seems unlikely that some of the cheap $15 vises off amazon would hold up to a century of use.

As I shifted attention to building the two end assemblies—legs, stretchers, etc, I realized that I don’t have enough lumber. I thought I would get a little bit of extra lumber from cutting up pieces for the bench top, but there was nothing really usable. So I scoured the classifieds again and found a guy selling some beams. He didn’t know what they were and thought they were hardwood, but couldn’t really tell. I ended up picking them up for $40—four hardwood beams that are about 9’ long and a full 4”x6” actual dimensions. I wanted to see what I had under there—they were heavy enough to definitely be hardwood. Turns out, two oak, and two of what I think are maple? I have never worked with maple before, but it looks like pics I have seen and it feels very smooth. Anyone know of a way to tell if it is hard or soft maple? How to tell red oak vs white oak? The guy said these were used to ship a giant military forklift from one US base to another—some sort of tie down structure.

Anyway, that is where I am at right now. However, I have hit a huge obstacle—my planer has stopped working and I am trying to troubleshoot that. Maybe you can read another post of mine to see if you can help?