Thread: Jarrah Workbench Top Thickness

Originally Posted by michael_m

Did you try planing on the sawhorses, but with the ends of the wood butted up against the wall? I did that for mine and it stopped the sawhorses moving all over the shop (actually, I butted up against a chest of drawers that was against the wall, but the principle is sound).

not sure how that could work if you are planing the full length of the board, unless I am misunderstanding your setup

I get what he's talking about. It's a little tricky but you can make it work. Cabinet or no, my sawhorses tend to walk, rock and wobble under the weight. It's just an enormous piece of wood, so no matter how you do it, it's a lot of work by hand.

Originally Posted by doug3030

not sure how that could work if you are planing the full length of the board, unless I am misunderstanding your setup

You're right, it doesn't work for the full length of the board, but it does if you have excess length. When I made my top, I made it to 1900 out of 2700 long boards. That gave me plenty of stopping room even for the #7 plane; and later when the top was glued up and clamped to the sawhorses, I planed the offcuts down to become the legs.

The choice of material for a bench is definitely influenced by what tools & machinery you have access to. I'm lucky to have plenty of old hardwood drop into my lap (metaphorically speaking!) & have the gear to work it without killing myself, so the last 4 benches I've made all cost nothing but a bit extra on the power bills and a couple of extra planer/thicknesser knife sharpenings. I would hate to have to clean up enough recycled Spotted Gum for a bench top with hand planes! I reckon I'd wear out at least one sharpening stone, not to mention a few joints! So if I were not so well-equipped, & wanting a bench, I would definitely consider easier materials like pine or ply. As Jake says, you can always incorporate some hardwood inserts where dog holes have to go, or use hardwood edging where vises are to be attached, etc. I have some large baulks of P. radiata from a tree I took down last year, drying behind the shed. I was thinking of using some of it to make a Roubo style bench, and doing it all with hand tools just for fun. However, by the time it's ready, I will probably have come to my senses & find someone with more strength & energy who wants to use it...

Mooncabbage, trying to plane a large surface on the floor or on rocking trestles would be extremely difficult, alright! Can't you leave flattening 'til you've got the undercarriage built? At the very least I'd be making some sort of temporary frame to sit it on while doing the jobs like flattening or fitting the vises, which frequently requires flipping the top multiple times. A few dollars worth of utility-grade studs & some coach-screws could save a lot of back-pain....

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

...trying to plane a large surface on the floor or on rocking trestles would be extremely difficult, alright! Can't you leave flattening 'til you've got the undercarriage built? At the very least I'd be making some sort of temporary frame to sit it on while doing the jobs like flattening or fitting the vises, which frequently requires flipping the top multiple times. A few dollars worth of utility-grade studs & some coach-screws could save a lot of back-pain....

I agree with Ian here for sure! A bench build should start with the legs first.

I hope to be starting my first "real bench" build later this year. At this stage I have nothing for the top except the vise hardware, which I bought about six years ago. Bench builds can take a long time .

I got the timber for the undercarriage over a year ago. It is a large beam of quarter-sawn oregon 140 x 450 x 6500 mm in three lengths just over 2 metres each. It has some splitting to work around but if I cant find enough in that for the base for a bench and a whole lot more there is something wrong. I am hoping a couple of saw-benches (as opposed to saw horses) at least and a shave-horse in a couple of years time. Then I might cut the remainder up into pen-blanks and sell them in the marketplace

When the time comes to make the top I will need to use hardwood for the dog-hole board because I am making a tail-vise. The rest of the top might well finish up being plywood with some 1/2 inch strips of hardwood laminated on the top for the sake of durability and appearance. Then with a hardwood skirt around the whole top the plywood would not be visible unless you look underneath.

I posted the above as another point of view on bench construction that may assist the OP, and I don't want this thread to be hijacked into a discussion on my bench, please.

Cheers

Doug

Originally Posted by doug3030

I agree with Ian here for sure! A bench build should start with the legs first....

That's not quite what I meant, Doug. I actually start with the top, for a number of reasons. One reason is that since I am usually using scrounged material, I begin with very rough & variable bits of wood. What they tidy-up to can be a very variable feast, but once I know what sizes it will yield, I can then work out what length the legs need to be, to get the correct height. I think if I were starting from nothing, I would make a temporary bench out of cheap utility studs, as I said above. It doesn't have to be more than a skeleton, but it could make life very much easier!

It's been a very long time since I had to make a bench without having some sort of existing bench to work on. Thirty or 40 years ago I might have tried working on the floor like they do in Asia, but I'm afraid I'm far too ancient & stiff to even think about that, these days!

Cheers,

If the bench is going in the basement with a concrete floor, there is another option.

Burn the Jarrah. (I guess it make good firewood).

Buy Bessa blocks and a few wheel borrows of cement. Make your base out of that with heaps of rio, cemented straight on the floor, then dino bolt a ply bench top to that. Ideally made of say 3 pieces of 30mm ply !….. 90mm thick bench top total with heaps of overhang so you don't smash your knees into the bess a blocks and can keep a better posture. Stick vices into the top…. and for the sliding deadman, dino bolt down a sliding door rail on the cement floor and screw a matching one to the underside of the bench top, and run your array of dog holes vertically between the rails in a bit of hardwood using door runners.

Nill bench movement. Perfect transfer of energy with mallet blows and plane passes.

Only real men have benches made out of bessa blocks.

Originally Posted by IanW

That's not quite what I meant, Doug. I actually start with the top, for a number of reasons...

Sorry for misrepresenting your intentions there Ian, but I guess building a bench is as personal as the bench itself. There are as many ways as there are bench-builders. Like I said this will be my first build of a "real bench" so the second edition will probably be different to the first. Up until now I have just made do with substitutes but i keep getting drawn closer and closer to the "dark side" and away from the machines as time goes by so a proper bench is becoming necessary.

Cheers

Doug

OH good lord, I have no intention of flattening the top on saw horses. I just need to joint them for lamination (I don't have a machine jointer). I will probably rough out my leg pieces first, because I have spare pieces of that in case I mess it up. Will leave the tenons fat for fitting to the mortises after though.

Debating whether I want to do a wedged dovetail tenon, draw-bore, or both. My current plan is for a double tenon, draw-bored in place, rather than glued. That way if I ever do need to move the workbench, I can drill out the pegs/dowels, and disassemble the whole thing. Then I can peel off the roof of my house and get a crane to lift the benchtop out for me.

Also I think some pine or tas oak dowels will contrast nicely with the jarrah, and look pretty cool.

What I have considered is putting some kind of soft pine or something on top of the jarrah, because it'd be easier to true, and less hard on my tools if I slip. Also I hear dark workbenches are hard to see on. What I'm not sure about is wood movement if I glue it all down. I was thinking, if it was sufficiently thin it wouldn't matter. Not something I know anything about, so your expertise would be very much appreciated.

Originally Posted by Mooncabbage

OH good lord, I have no intention of flattening the top on saw horses. I just need to joint them for lamination (I don't have a machine jointer)....

I thought you meant top-flattening, my mistake. I still think a very crude skeleton bench made from the cheapest materials you can get or scrounge, bolted or coach-screwed together, woulkd make life much easier for you!

Originally Posted by Mooncabbage

...Debating whether I want to do a wedged dovetail tenon, draw-bore, or both. My current plan is for a double tenon, draw-bored in place, rather than glued. That way if I ever do need to move the workbench, I can drill out the pegs/dowels, and disassemble the whole thing. Then I can peel off the roof of my house and get a crane to lift the benchtop out for me........

Peeling the roof may be a leetle bit ott, but I get the idea.

Don't know how they'd go with pine, but for hardwood, 'tusked tenons' work a treat. These are just through-tenons wedged with a knock-out wedge where they protrude. They are perfect for a bench because they self-tighten if the legs shrink or move & don't work loose. Wooden 'nails' work well - again, haven't done any draw-bore style fixing of softwoods, but it certainly works well in hardwoods. A bit more bother having to drill them out to disassemble, but not that much, & it sounds like you are determined to leave this bench in the basement, anyway.

Originally Posted by Mooncabbage

......What I have considered is putting some kind of soft pine or something on top of the jarrah, because it'd be easier to true, and less hard on my tools if I slip. Also I hear dark workbenches are hard to see on. What I'm not sure about is wood movement if I glue it all down. I was thinking, if it was sufficiently thin it wouldn't matter. Not something I know anything about, so your expertise would be very much appreciated.

Hmm, here is where I lose you, a bit... What do you do to your tools on a benchtop?!!

To my mind, the tougher the bench top, the longer it lasts. I don't set out to abuse my bench, but if it suffers the odd injury in the course of work, well, so do I (I keep a couple of packets of bandaids handy for the latter situation!). I've re-surfaced my bench once in 30 years, and scraped it off & re-oiled it 4 or 5 times when the crud built up to an annoying extent. The re-surfacing was to level it, because the wood hadn't properly equilibrated when I built it & the top moved a bit (helped by the pretty severe climate changes it experienced). That was hard yakka, & not something I would repeat purely for cosmetic purposes. It has a few lots of dings, and a couple of divots in front of some dog-holes where chisels have gone through during paring, or something, but it still holds things just the same as when new.

When I were a lad learning woodwork at school, our MT teacher would clip us over the ear if we put a plane down on its sole - you had to put it on its side to 'protect the blade'. Years later, I reasoned that if that blade is designed to cut wood, how come putting it down (reasonably gently) on wood is going to harm it? So with some guilty pleasure, I started putting my planes down on the bench sole-down. I thought it might mark the bench top, perhaps, but it makes the plane so much more convenient to pick up again. I'm pleased to report after 40 years of doing it that way, I haven't noticed any deleterious effects on either blades or bench top!

And I simply don't get the colour thing at all. There have been discussions in other threads on the 'right' colour for a bench. I worked on lab benches all my life, and there were those who insisted on dark bench-tops and those who insisted on light ones. I could never see the point of the argument, since I spent most of my time looking at what was on the bench, not the bench top. My woodworking bench happens to be light (Rock Maple), which has developed a pale creamy colour with age (between the numerous stains), but most of the time I couldn't tell you what colour it is - it's covered by the chunk of wood I'm working on, shavings, tools & extraneous junk (I should be tidier, I know! ), so it could be black or white & you'd never know.....

Cheers,

Well seasoned jarrah is HARD. Also apparently due to silica content or something, it has a tendency to blunt tools. So my reasoning was that avoiding accidentally pounding a chisel into it might save on sharpening. However my primary reason for laminating the surface with a lighter wood is because I'm told it's easier to see what you're doing on a light benchtop. I don't know if that's particularly true, so I'm curious to hear people's thoughts.

Lighter colour is better, but if you have sufficient lighting (i.e. HEAPS) then it shouldn't be a really big deal.

Yeah my workspace has no windows, so only artificial lighting. Lighter top might be the way to go. If i was to laminate the top in pine, what sort of thickness should i look at to avoid problems with shrinkage and expansion? 6mm? More or less?

Since you intend covering the wood anyway, why not just paint it? Far simpler than mucking about trying to laminate it with a pine top. Sticking a couple more fluoros over your bench makes greater sense to me. I fail to see how light reflected back up off a bench is going to illuminate what you are looking down on - it's more likely to be a nuisance, imo. That's the justification the dark-bench aficionados use for their preference for dark (light absorbing) tops.

And yes, I know Jarrah is pretty hard, and a bit of a tool-duller, but it's down the scale quite a bit from our local Spotted gum, I can tell you! You are highly unlikely to damage a chisel all that much if you accidentally drive it into the bench top. That's what a chisel is meant for, after all. If you do damage it, I suggest you should look critically at your grinding/honing angles, or maybe look for some new chisels....

Cheers,