2. Workshop

Work Bench for the Home

A longer term project to build a work bench and tool storage combo that will look good enough to reside in our kitchen.
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The visible front edge of my shelf I planed a chamfer on to make it a little more showy, and then matched it to the legs with stain.
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The visible front edge of my shelf I planed a chamfer on to make it a little more showy, and then matched it to the legs with stain.

  • With the frame members all finished and sanded, I gave them a couple coats of stain and polyurethane to dress them up nice.
  • The frame glued together pretty well, albeit a bit tightly on the parts that are supposed to move. I's super solid, just like I wanted it, and it's beautiful like I wanted it, too.
  • The vise I ordered online is a Shop Fox with nothing especially fancy involved. It attaches to the underside of the bench top and is super solid.
  • With the frame members assembled, the last element before this becomes a working bench is the plywood for the sides and back. I made the cuts again with a hand saw and planed down the edges to the exact finish I was looking for.
  • With the mortises in the table bottom cut a little loose, my plan was to keep them solidly attached using spax screws. The idea was to allow a little wiggle room horizontally for the wood to expand and contract, but judging by how I had to get on top of the bench and stomp the top into place, and with the expansion of the legs as I screwed into them, I think my looseness was really just enough to get it to go together. It certainly doesn't have much wiggle room now.
  • The plywood back and sides I simply cut to the right shape, shaved a little off the edges to allow it to fit better into the dados I had carved, and then gave it a protective couple coats of polyurethane, keeping the regular wood color.
  • The bench finally comes together! This was a nice finish to the first chapter of the bench, and I'm already finding the work a lot easier now that I have a workbench to do it on. Now on to some of the details!
  • The first accessory I installed was a power strip, which I attached to the right side and then cut the cord so I could run it inside and out of sight. The cord will run out the back under the bottom frame rail, and I'll probably splice in some other items like strip lighting later.
  • The wood screws I used to attach the power strip were a bit long, so I cut them off with a dremel.
  • I don't have the lifting mechanism engineered yet, but I dropped the bench on its side and attached the wheels to the moving bars on each side. The rest of the lifting and wheeling system will come later.
  • When I grabbed a dowel for my vise I got one a little too large, but I planed it down into an octagon on advice from a fellow woodworker, and the feel is a lot nicer in the hand. I'm not sure if I'll be sticking with this one, but it'll do for now.
  • Starting to fill the space inside this thing, my first step is a shelf to put tools on and keep them handy, but out of the way. I chopped this chunk of wood to fit, dressed up the front a little, and filled the space behind it with less showy plywood.
  • The visible front edge of my shelf I planed a chamfer on to make it a little more showy, and then matched it to the legs with stain.
  • One of my most annoying tools has been my straight edge, which never fits anywhere and generally stands in a corner someplace getting routinely knocked over. I fixed that problem by adding some brackets to the back of the bench top that not only give it a place to live, but keep it snugly pulled against the wood so it doesn't rattle, and it's now always immediately available.
  • Once the stain dried on my shelf, I stapled down a floor mat for some cushion. The large front section of this shelf is solid wood to make it prettier, but that piece didn't go the full depth of the bench, so I added a strip of plywood on the back to fill the shelf out.
  • Another element here I'm not sure about keeping is a pair of wooden balls to cap the handle of the vise. They look alright and function fine, but I'd like something fancier down the road.
  • There's a ton of details left to finalize on the outside of this thing, but I've been excited to get to the meatier elements. Using some 3/4in pine for the sides I spent a couple days doing some dovetailing and dados for the lowest and largest of the drawers in my design. I had considered doing a number of smaller drawers, but I think full width drawers will be easier to manage things with, so I decided to just do six full-width drawers of varying depths.
  • These borrowed clamps have been seeing some heavy use on this project, in this photo holding the drying edges on my first drawer, which assembled with only a little bit of a struggle, and really seems a lot more solid than I had expected it to be. The sliders I got for it claim to be rated for 75 pounds, so we'll see about that with this guy...
  • Even with some careful measuring, my drawers are pretty unlikely to be even on the faces, so I'm giving myself the best shot and covering up some exposed plywood at the same time, by placing a piece of 90 degree trim behind the drawer faces. Unfortunately there's a few things in the way, so I have to do some detailed notching to make it all go together.
  • While away from home and my new carpenter's vise, I'm forced to improvise and come up with something that will hold my boards while I work on all the dovetails for all of these drawers. The process is pretty simple and I think I've got it at least roughly honed through repetition, which was one of my goals.
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