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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Cutting mortises is something I've never done, seen done, or really even imagined how it's done. I had to do a bit of investigating online, and found a really nice video by Paul Sellers on hand mortising, which got me started on the right path and led to about eight hours (no really) of hammering a chisel into my boards. The results work out pretty good for a first-timer, I think.
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Cutting mortises is something I've never done, seen done, or really even imagined how it's done. I had to do a bit of investigating online, and found a really nice video by Paul Sellers on hand mortising, which got me started on the right path and led to about eight hours (no really) of hammering a chisel into my boards. The results work out pretty good for a first-timer, I think.

  • I started this project (after the planning phase of course) like any good Valley resident, and brought home a bunch of eight foot 2x6s sticking out the window of my car. Somebody had to document this, of course.
  • My house being somewhat lacking in power tools and shop space, the living room was taken over and the hand tools have been seeing a bit of use. Step one of phase one was to cut the boards roughly to the width of the bench top. I was actually pleasantly surprised at the straightness of my cuts, having not spent a lot of time on a hand saw lately.
  • Step two was a multi-day process of gluing the boards together in chunks, with the final gluing pictured here. I lined up the boards at one end with the thought of cutting the other end flat, and had very little trouble except that I started with too few clamps, which made the middle about an eighth of an inch thicker than the ends in the end, but that will be fixed.
  • The final gluing complete, I chopped off an end as straight as I could manage, which wasn't exactly as straight as I'd have liked, but it worked anyway.
  • Having just acquired a few hand planes and spent some time sharpening them, I was eager to put them to use on this project and spend some time getting the hang of using them. It may have worked better had I been able to plane each board prior to glue-up, but I went with gluing first and planing later, and it worked out alright. The one thing I'd do differently would be to align the boards before gluing with as much grain as possible going the same direction, since I had to change direction in different places while planing, although the biggest problem was around the knots in the boards, which is sort of unavoidable.
  • The ends of the boards line up with a lot less gap after the preliminary planing to get rid of the rounded factory edges.
  • I drew up a bit of a plan to get some numbers written down. It's picking up more and more details as the project progresses, but this is the general layout of the body of the bench. I went through several designs for a system that would lift up onto wheels when desired, but sit solidly on the legs for working, and settled on this one with a sliding tenoned bar underneath the main bar on each side, with wheels mounted to that and a jacking system (yet to be drawn in) in the space between the two. Still working on designing the jack.
  • Cutting all these tenons made me dislike end grain cuts. Maybe it's easier on smaller dimensions, but I spent a few hours with the hand saw, clamping the boards to the bench and working on cutting straight lines over and over and over. Improvement is a big part of the drive behind this project!
  • Cutting mortises is something I've never done, seen done, or really even imagined how it's done. I had to do a bit of investigating online, and found a really nice video by Paul Sellers on hand mortising, which got me started on the right path and led to about eight hours (no really) of hammering a chisel into my boards. The results work out pretty good for a first-timer, I think.
  • The framework here is mostly complete, only lacking the sliding bars for the wheels.
  • The mortises for the sliding bars are going to be visible in the final product, so I wanted them to be a little smoother than what I was getting by hand. I built a router jig using some oak as fences and some 2x4s, the ruler from a square, and a metal T-brace as spacers, and then gradually worked the slot deeper in small increments using my router, an old Black and Decker which is not really made for deep plunge cuts. I had to shorten the tenons on these pieces because the longest bit I could get was a little shorter than what I wanted, but the results came out nice and clean.
  • To get a block of wood big enough for my planned vise, I did a little reaching out and found several friends with scraps of the proper dimensions, and wound up going with this one which I cut to rough dimensions with a chain saw - also borrowed. When I went to plane these cuts later I found them almost perfectly square, and I only had to take something like a sixteenth off in different places to get it exact, which was pretty cool.
  • The vise I got on Amazon came in a blue color, which wasn't exactly what I'm looking for, so I changed it to black.
  • When the time came for drilling some holes in my vise plate I conveniently found myself with a shop that had a drill press, and after all the work it took to get these holes drilled perfectly through four inches of board with a press I was quite happy to not have to do it by hand.
  • Fresh holes drilled in an unfinished vise plate, with the vise assembled, but not mounted. I have a few unrefined thoughts on what to do with this plate to make it beautiful, but haven't decided on anything just yet.
  • Going back to the mortises for my sliding bars, I finished up the corners with a chisel, trying to make them as neat as I could. It's not quite as smooth as the routered parts, but it'll do!
  • With all the mortises, tenons, and a couple dados cut in my boards it came time for the final sanding, which cleaned up all the extra glue I used to fill cracks and took a bunch of the discoloration off my beams. It took a while, but the results are nice.
  • With the final sanding complete I decided to finish the bench top, because I keep working on it and adding marks and stuff into the unprotected wood. I used boiled linseed oil since it seemed to be the most common tool for the job and I'm learning pretty much every step as I go here. The finished look is pretty much perfect.
  • For attaching the bench top to the frame I cut a few more mortises, this time leaving them a little loose to account for expansion of the wood in the top and prevent it from affecting the frame members. By now mortising like this is getting pretty straightforward for me, which was a part of my intentions with this project.
  • My vise plate had a lot of age to it, so I took most of that off with some hand planing and a bit of sanding. I'm not sure yet whether to keep this in a block shape as it is, or try carving something fancier or artsy into it. We'll see about that down the road.
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