Making a workbench

After working for a number of years on the carpenters bench that I found slowly rotting away in a shed - that would be this one:



I decided that it would be a good idea to get myself a new one. The old one has a very substantial twist in the top (which is also in poor condition), and the legs are rickety. One leg - the one closest the camera - I replaced myself, but my attempts to clean up the top with a plane revealed - ouch! - that at some time a large number of nails had been driven into it. They had rusted enough to make it impossible to pull them out. It is a classic French country design: note the slanting back legs, the way the front legs are fixed with a combined mortise and dovetail (this probably has a technical name), and the "leg vice" nearest the camera. The lower tray is my own addition in the hope of making it less rickety, and the three drawers beneath the surface I added too (from an old armoire which is now a wardrobe). It was originally simply a single slab of (I think) oak with four legs mortised directly into it. I only last week worked out what was missing from the leg vice - pegs in the sliding pin at the bottom - and it is now remarkably effective. But sadly the bench as a whole is beyond repair.

So I went out with my credit card and came back with my new bench:



in kit form, that is. These are rough-sawn beech planks: two of them 54mm thick and 3.5 metres long (11 foot 6inches), and the other five 34mm thick and 3 metres long (a bit less than 10 foot). The bigger ones are too heavy for me to lift, and driving back with them like this was a little tricky, as they overlapped the front of the trailer quite a bit, which meant that I would take a tight right-hand corner at the risk of knocking out the rear window of the car.

I plan to remove the leg-vice mechanism from the old bench and incorporate it in the new one, but with a better lower fulcrum.



The big screw is a square-cut thread (3 and a half threads per inch) on a rod of 23mm diameter, and concealed behind the fixed leg is a big iron boss with an internal thread to match. What it doesn't have (and should) is a way of retaining the outer end of the rod in the moving jaw. At present if you undo the mechanism it tends to wind out of both the fixed and moving parts: ideally as it goes back it should bring the moving jaw with it. It needs a groove cut into metal rod at the outer end, and a two-part metal plate locating into the groove and fastened to the wood.

The design for the bench is based on one I found on the net:



It won't have the central trays, as I don't have room for a wide bench, and the shoulder vice - the one on the left - will be a leg vice which I have tried to sketch out. The top will be laminated from strips cut from the the thick plank. It will be about 70 to 75mm thick. The legs will be about 100mm square, and will be laminated from the thinner planks. I do plan to have a tray at the back, and I also hope to make the tail vice perform an additional task. More later ....