giant Cypress: Japanese woodworking tool punk • Overbuilt?

Overbuilt?

The current project of Marc Spagnuolo’s Wood Whisperer Guild is a split top Roubo workbench featuring hardware from Benchcrafted. Recently, Brian Tracey posted a writeup on his Roubo workbench on the Wood Whisperer site. In the comments on the bench, choots raises a good question about sustainability:

This is no doubt a well-crafted and beautiful piece. I’ve been admiring all the workbenches on this site for a while, and have been noticing a recent trend to more massive benches. I just have to interject a comment I have yet to see regarding most of them. Where is the responsibility and stewardship with wood in building a workbench like this? Is there really a need for such an amount of wood as this to make a sturdy, functional, and long lasting bench? You could make that top and those legs almost half as thick and you wouldn’t lose any functionality and it would still look great…. As woodworkers, we should be responsible with wood and able to produce designs that meet requirements for a reasonable cost with the least environmental impact possible. We need to be good stewards with the resources we have – the trend towards bigger is better in benches that I see here and elsewhere is troubling.

Luckily, this question can be answered pretty quickly with our good friend math.

My Roubo is made of construction lumber (Douglas fir), is 8’ long, 22” deep, has a 3-1/2” thick top, 5” square legs, is about 29” tall, and uses 4x4’s as stretchers. All together, that’s about 88 board feet of wood. If I add in the pine boards that I used for building a shelf across the stretchers for storage, that’s an additional 10 board feet.

The first bookcase plan that I found on the Fine Woodworking website is a freestanding bookcase that is about 5-1/2’ tall, 3-1/2’ wide, and 15” deep. It has 5 shelves. A quick calculation gives me about 40 board feet of lumber to make that project.

So these “massive” Roubo benches are the equivalent of 2-1/2 bookcases in terms of the wood used. Assume that you made another workbench design that uses half the wood of a Roubo. That saves about one bookcase worth of wood. I hardly think that this is an extravagant waste of resources given that a well-built workbench is something you will use every single time you step into your workshop.

And given that most people would make these benches out of relatively cheap or reclaimed wood, the sustainability issue becomes even less of a factor.

Disclaimer: I’m about as big of a lefty-socialist-hippie-commie-tree-hugging-bleeding-heart as you’ll find. I think that Gibson Guitars really was up to something (sorry, Shannon). Even so, I still think that trying to make the case that a Roubo bench is an extravagant waste of natural resources is a bit of an overstatement.