Beech worktop

The workbench top is now assembled and glued. It's good and heavy (about 70kg I think) and the glued joints look pretty robust.



I've made a start at planing it level, which is quite hard work, so it will be a day or two before it's flat. The discolouration on the surface is the glue I used. Eventually I will have planed it all off to get a clean surface. The glue tends to clog the plane's mouth, so that also slows the work down a little. The clean part nearest the camera is the bit I was able to get through the big noisy planer after it was glued.

The under surface is worse than the top, but it only needs to be roughly level - sufficiently so that I can fasten it securely to the underframe (the next job I need to do).

Despite having a large and miscellaneous collection of clamps to hold it all while it glued, the job wasn't entirely satisfactory. I ought to have known that running each piece through the planer/thicknesser would give me a cross-section that was at best a parallelogram, and not necessarily a rectangle. The result was that when I clamped them altogether, I ended up with a surface that had a slightly saw-backed profile. The high edges will all need to be planed down.

In addition, some of the pieces were warped not just horizontally (in the same plane as the surface) but also vertically. These had to be clamped down level using thick battens across the high spots. The result was some end-to-end undulations too.

And of course, the grain on the separate pieces runs in alternating directions, so actually getting it smooth with the plane is a bit of a challenge. I found myself wondering if I wouldn't be better trying to borrow a (hand-held) electric plane.

The surface is just over 50cm wide (20 inches). I have not yet decided whether I want to add a row of lift-out tool trays at the back. The advantage of that would be (a) to give a place to put planes and chisels rather than under the job I'm working on, and (b) to make it easy to put clamps at the back to hold wider projects down onto the surface (without having to pull the whole bench away from the wall). The disadvantage is simply the added width of the bench.