giant Cypress

Building a workbench without a workbench - II, or, Who needs a 400 lb. workbench when you have a scrap piece of 1x4?

When I first started woodworking, for a workbench I was making do with the Sears version of a Workmate, which does fine as a clamping device, but it moves all over the place when I’m trying to plane something. I decided that I needed something better, but I didn’t really know how to go about building a workbench if I didn’t have a workbench to build one with.

But then I had an “Aha!” moment. I had come into possession of a board of poplar 3-1/4” thick, 8-3/4” wide, and 6-1/2 feet long. It was rough cut, with a lot of dirt and bird poop on it. I also had been reading Scott Landis’ “The Workbench Book”, and in the chapter on Japanese woodworking workshops, there is some discussion on trestle beam workbenches and planing beams. I figured there was a way to combine the two.

I planed the beam down so that the surface was level. Then I put it on some sawhorses, and put a board of 3/4” pine on the back side of it to serve as a place to hold tools.

This breaks all the rules for a workbench. The top is is just sitting on top of the base, without any method of fastening the base to the top, it’s lightweight, and the main work surface is made of poplar. So how can this set up be at all stable?

Here’s where the 1x4 comes in. I nailed the 1x4 scrap to the underside of one of the sawhorses, and set it up so that it butts up against the wall of my workshop. On the underside of the poplar beam I installed two screws so that the heads protruded above the surface by a little bit, and arranged the beam so that the screws rested against the cross beam of the sawhorse.

I installed another two screws so that the heads were above the top surface of the beam, and placed a thin scrap of cherry across them to make a planing stop.

With Japanese planes, which work on the pull stroke, everything locks into place under planing pressure. The plane pulls on the workpiece, which butts into the cherry planing stop, which butts up against the screws. This pushes on the beam, which butts up against the sawhorse with the two screws on the underside, and the sawhorse runs into the wall thanks to the scrap piece of 1x4. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING moves. If this workbench is going to move, that means I was planing so hard that I shifted the position of my basement wall.

A similar setup would work for western planes, if you made a mirror image of this setup. If you’re a lefty western plane user, you could use this setup as is.

Sawing can be done with Japanese saws, which cut on the pull stroke, because the pull stroke clamps the workpiece to the bench top, again locking everything in place.

Crosscutting:

Cutting dovetails (my 5 year old boy took this photo!):

By the way, if you ever wanted a good demonstration of the kind of surface that a Japanese plane can leave on wood, check out the light round thing on the side of the beam. That’s the reflection of my saw where the handle meets the blade. There’s no finish and no sanding here. I just planed down the roughness on the side of the beam with my Japanese plane, which isn’t anything special. I bought it used on eBay.

Chiseling tasks worked just fine with this bench. I generally try to direct chisel cuts so that I am pushing or chopping down into the bench anyway, and I can use the planing stop to brace the workpiece against. I could always resort to clamping the workpiece to the poplar beam if I have to.

This setup was supposed to be my temporary workbench. I found that this bench was so solid that “temporary” turned out to be 8 months.