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.

The Woodworking Show, Somerset, NJ, Feb 24-26

The woodworking club that I belong to, the Central Jersey Woodworkers Association, will have a booth at The Woodworking Show at the Garden State Exhibit Center in Somerset on Feb. 24-26. Our club will be running demos throughout the weekend.

Bob Rozaieski and I will be at the CJWA booth on Saturday afternoon, so expect some East vs. West woodworking cage match action. Please stop by and say hi.

I should also note that Lee Valley was kind enough to donate a pair of Veritas carcass saws for a raffle prize to anyone who joins our club between now and June. My greatest thanks goes out to Lee Valley for their generosity.

Building a Japanese Workbench

Speaking of Nik Brown, he did a terrific writeup for Get Woodworking Week on building Japanese style sawhorses that serve as a basis for his workbench.

I have a pair of sawhorses that are made from 2x4’s screwed into sheet metal brackets that I got from the local borg. Boy, am I embarrassed.

Waste not, want not

Nik Brown doesn’t know you can’t use Japanese saws on hardwoods, much less exotics like ebony.

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.

Japanese puzzle boxes, called himitsu-bako. I would love to learn how to make these.

(Thanks to Nick Brygidyr for the link, via Chris Wong.)

Here’s one last item for Get Woodworking Week. The woodworking club that I belong to, the Central Jersey Woodworker’s Association, recently started group build projects. These are not exactly like a traditional woodworking class, but instead are a way for CJWA members to take advantage of the experience and talents of other CJWA members who lead these Group Builds. The way that these builds are structured is that each small group of people meet on a regular basis at the leader’s shop to go over each step of the project, and then go home to their shop to work on the project. Each project is designed to take a relatively short period of time, and are usually at an intermediate level of difficulty.

How effective are these group build projects? Here’s an example of what can be learned and accomplished. This Arts and Crafts table with a turquoise inlay in the top was made by one of our members. This table was the first woodworking project she had ever made. And she made this table out of pallet wood, no less.

This will be ironic considering that Get Woodworking Week is an internet-based initiative, but one of the most effective ways of getting started in woodworking is to find a local woodworking club and meet real live woodworkers in person. The club member who made this table said that she had learned a lot from videos and the internet, but there was so much more that she picked up in person that there would have been no way she could have done this without hands on help from someone else. If you go to a local club, there will be a lot of people eager and willing to help you get started, and all it will cost you is the time to go there.

What you need to get a kid into woodworking:

  1. A kid.
  2. A piece of wood.
  3. A tool.