Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 6
(Originally written Jan 26-29, 2009)
I was thinking about working on the legs for my workbench, and realized that I had made a tactical error. This bench is going to be a Roubo, and I was planning on using 4x4s for the legs, which would wind up being slightly less than 3-1/2” sqaure. Problem is, the plans I’m working from call for legs that are 5” square. At first I thought, “Who cares if the leg is 5” or 3-1/2 inches square?” and so I would just use the 4x4s as they were.
Except that I then realized last night that for this bench design, in addition to providing support, the legs also make up clamping surfaces, and I’d go from a leg vice that’s 5 inches in width to a leg vice that’s 3 1/2” or less in width. I don’t think that the leg thickness matters that much for the sturdiness of the bench, but I can see how clamping would benefit from a wider surface.
The cheap and easy way out of this is to just glue a wider board on the front of the 4x4s, sort of like a T shape, but it’s my bench, and I’ll have to look at it. So 5” legs it is.
I came come up with a variety of ways to do the glue up, which are in the picture. They all seem to have some pros and cons.
A would result in the neatest appearing leg, but I don’t know if I have to worry about the leg splitting over time with movement if I encase the 4x4 on all sides.
B allows me to use the 4x4 stock that I have on hand without having to go buy wider boards. It’s also the ugliest.
C would be a little easier than A, and still has a relatively neat appearance. I’d have to go buy additional wider 8/4 material to do this.
D is the easiest to do, but I’d have to go buy even more additional wider 8/4 material than in option C to do this.
Myself, I’m leaning towards A. I know I won’t mind the extra gluing steps, and as I said, it will be the neatest appearing out of them all.
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After further consideration, I came to my senses. Actually, it wasn’t really me that came to my senses. It was Steve Altman, an incredible woodworker who makes amazing boxes, and who is also a fellow member of the Central Jersey Woodworkers Association, the woodworking club I belong to. He sent me a note that I’ve lost, much to my chagrin, but it said something like this:
Make a proper leg, and do it the right way. This is your workbench. This is a tool that you will use every single time you go into your shop. And you’re trying to save on what, $15-20 of construction lumber? You’re going to blow away that amount of money in scrap wood on the next project you make out of any decent quality lumber. So do it right.
I stopped by the borg on the way home, and found a couple of 2x12s that I milled up and laminated together for making 5” square laminated legs, which can be seen in the top photo. That was the best $20 I ever spent.
Resawing technique by Tanaka Kiyoto, a Japanese luthier. I love how he uses an assistant to stabilize his otherwise craptastic workbench. I’ll have to add that to my list of ways to make do when you don’t have a massive workbench to use.
There are more photos of his saw on his blog (Google translation). It’s interesting how his saw has deep notches in it much like western saws with a Tuttle tooth pattern.
(Thanks to Jameel Abraham for the link. Photo from Traditional Woodworker.)
UPDATE: apparently Tanaka Kiyoto’s assistant is his wife, according to the Google translation of this blog post.
Toshio Odate in his workshop. The Workbench Book
One of the more common knocks against Japanese woodworking techniques are comments to the effect of “Why would anyone want to work on the floor?” The thing is, with these techniques, you aren’t working on the floor. You’re sitting on your workbench.
Also, check out that awesome saw collection.
Source: brushfactorywoodwork
Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 5
(Originally written Jan. 23, 2009)
I finished flattening the bottom to the degree that I wanted to. Again, it went much more quickly than I expected. Only 30 minutes with a jointer plane, and the bottom of the benchtop was flattened to the point that I couldn’t identify any twist or wind with winding sticks. (Actually, I used a four foot level at one end, and held up a yardstick at the other.)
So here’s what it looks like relative to the rest of my workshop:
And a better view of the surface. Remember, this will be the bottom side of my bench:
I’m going to let this top sit like this for a little bit, while I figure out what to do about the final size and location. Originally, I wanted to have this bench up against the far wall in the first picture, but I would have to shorten it a fair amount. In its present position in the middle of the room, I lose space, but I could keep most of the length. I might trim about 6” off to make it easier to get around the bandsaw. Or I could reconfigure the base of the bandsaw to move it a little closer to the wall, which will give me more room around the bench. Another thing in favor of the bench’s current position is that the lighting is really good here.
This will also give me a chance to see how much this top is going to move, left to its own devices. In the meantime, I can use this surface to make the legs and stretchers.
Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 4
(Originally written Jan 21, 2009)
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
(Originally written Jan. 19, 2009)
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
(Originally written Jan. 17, 2009)
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.
Q:I think the other good thing to remember about a Roubo bench is that the weight provided by that extra bookcase of lumber is an important part of the design in and of itself. The stability you get from it is worth the extra board feet.
Yup. Although there are ways to immobilize a workbench besides sheer mass.
Still, having that big slab of wood to work on is awesome.
