Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 4
Last night I got a leg up on flattening the bottom of my benchtop. When I was gluing up the beams, I tried to align the tops of the beams as best as I could. The top side looks pretty good, but what this means is that all the misalignments show up on the bottom side of the bench. Since I’m using a Roubo design, the legs are going to be mortised directly into the bottom, so if the bottom surface isn’t flat, the shoulders of the leg tenons won’t be in the same plane, and the legs and lower stretchers won’t be square.
I forgot to take a better “before” picture, but you can get an idea of how much unevenness there is between the bottom surfaces of the beams here. In many places, there were 1/8” discrepancies between the beams.
I put an even more aggressive camber on my jack plane than I had been using — about equivalent to a 10” radius. This allowed me to take off really thick shavings, close to 1/64”. This meant that theoretically, 8 swipes of the plane would level a 1/8” discrepancy. Being able to take down this much wood at a time, the majority of the unevenness was gone after only 30 minutes.
Look at the mess I made! Not bad for just 30 minutes of planing, I think. I was pretty surprised as to how quickly this went. You can get an idea of how thick the shavings from the jack plane were at the front by the jointer plane. The jointer plane is just there to give a sense of scale for the size of the benchtop. I didn’t use it last night, but I’m sure it will be put to use pretty soon.
At this point I realized that I hadn’t made winding sticks yet to check for twist, so I called it a night.
Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 3
Got the last glue up done for my workbench top! Whew! Glad that’s done with. Now all I have to do is flatten it.
The last photo shows what will be the top side. It wound up being 22 1/2” wide. Final length and thickness TBD.
Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 2
Some of my friends look at me like I’ve grown a second head when I tell them what I’m up to, especially when I tell them that I’m doing this with hand planes. This is probably not new to many readers of this blog, but I thought I’d share how this is really not as much manual labor as you might think.
Here’s a picture of how out of square the beam I was working on this morning was.
That’s out 1/16” over the 3-1/2” width of the beam. Boy do I suck!
Now, when most people think of hand planes, the image of a finely tuned plane making those 0.001”, wispy, see-through shavings that just float in the air immediately comes to mind for most people. We don’t need no girly-man plane like that for this job.
I have a jack plane set up with a decent amount of camber and set for an aggressive shaving. This is the shaving that I get with this plane.
Just under 1/100” thick, and it falls straight to the ground. Japanese plane aficionados like myself would be horrified at such a thing. But this is important for this purpose.
Remember, I need to knock down 1/16” to get the faces square. 1/16” = 0.0625”. If my plane takes a shaving 0.009” thick, it should take me only 7 swipes of the plane to take off 1/16” of material. This is what I got after 9 swipes. (I got excited.)
Not too bad! And easier than trying to put an eight foot long 4x4 back on my jointer. Not to mention the lack of dust and noise.
My beam is eight feet long, as I said. I can work on a 2 foot section at a time, so 4 rounds of this and I have the whole beam squared up.
Building a Roubo workbench rerun
Yes, this is another series of Roubo workbench build articles. I posted this on Woodnet three years ago when I was in the process of building my bench, as well as in installments on WoodCentral. So why repeat it here? My main reason is that I wanted these articles on my own website, so that just in case something happened to those forums, I would still have a record of it.
Also, lots of other woodworkers are posting about their Roubo workbench builds right now, and quite honestly I feel a little left out of the fun.
Why a Roubo for someone who uses Japanese tools? Even without the Japanese tool angle, I’ve liked the simplicity of the design ever since I first read about it in Scott Landis’ workbench book. Christopher Schwarz’s Roubo article in Woodworking magazine also made a big impression on me, and my Roubo workbench is pretty much this design, without hardly any modification.
After reading Chris’ subsequent articles on the Nicholson and Holtzapffel workbenches, I decided that the Roubo was the one for me. The thick top is quite close to the planing beam that Japanese woodworkers use, and the lack of a vise on the right hand corner of the benchtop provides a perfect place to put a planing stop for Japanese planes. The Nicholson and Holtzapffel designs both featured some sort of end vise in that position, and I thought that for Japanese planes, the end vise would be in the way, and that planing against the end vise would not be the best thing for the vise. Of course, at the time I was stupid enough not to realize that I could simply leave the end vise out.
So here goes a trip down memory lane. The dates are from when I originally wrote these posts up.
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Jan. 12, 2009
In a burst of energy with the new year, I finally made some movement towards building my “real” workbench. The temporary poplar-beam-on-sawhorses workbench that I had been using since May still works great. I was able to plane, chop mortises, do chisel work, and saw using it without issues. And actually, the main benefit that I think I will get from this bench is extra counter space. I think this benchtop will wind up being about 7’ x 22”. Over the past several months, I’ve needed the extra counter space much more than I’ve needed a leg vise.
Anyway, here’s where I started:
I jointed and squared up eight 8’ Douglas fir 4x4s that I’ve accumulated from a local borg over a 12 month period. When I’m done gluing this up, I expect to have a benchtop that’s essentially clear quartersawn Douglas fir with pretty tight grain.
The milling I did last Thursday. This weekend I made some headway in gluing up my workbench top. I learned just how much wood can twist and bow after you do initial milling. I also got a lot more practice at correcting this twist with hand planes, if you know what I mean. Although I know I know this, I am really surprised as to how quickly I can square up something this large with hand planes. In some ways, it was easier than the initial milling up with my jointer/planer combo.
The other thing I learned is that if one of my planes is working in a less than optimal manner, I know how to correct it. For some reason, though, I insist on just plowing ahead instead of stopping to tune up the plane, until I get to the point where I just have to do it. Then I find out that I’ll zip along three times as fast as I was.
To get going on this, I clamped together most of the 4x4’s together on the sawhorses to provide a temporary work surface, squared up two of the beams, and then unclamped the other 4x4’s to give me room to use the sawhorse as a support for the glue up. In fact, I had put the bar of the clamp on the top side so it could be used as a planing stop. As you can see in the picture, I’m also learning the true meaning of the phrase, “You can’t have too many clamps.” I placed an order for some more today. Hopefully they’ll get here in a timely manner.
All together, there will be eight 4x4’s going into this benchtop. I’m planning on gluing one additional beam a day, partly because I only have so many clamps, partly because of space issues (the picture really shows the entire width of my shop) and partly because I want to get a full day of drying time for the glue, just in case I didn’t take care of all the twist. I’ll probably do another set of three separately, and then finish up with the remaining 4x4s.
