Thread: Traditional work bench - let me run some ideas past you...

If only I had that much money burning a hole in my pocket

Originally Posted by BobL

I use my leather faced big front vice a lot more than I though I would...

I've now seen this mentioned a few times and I'm considering going this way also. Where did you get your leather from and what variety is it, Bob? I imagine pig skin might be a little thin for gluing, but cow hide would be quite good. Thoughts? Oh, um... what glue?

I spoke to my mothers neighbour this morning about his vices and he reckons the Carbatec front vice is the bees knees. He bought it for ~$70 a few years back and it has served him well through lots of semi-professional work. His only gripe was that the guide bars were slightly bent, but apparently this required very little effort to correct. So I'm off to buy vice hardware and start planning.

Vice Hardware Maintenance

In an effort to keep rust at arms length, I've been considering various forms of rust protection and lubrication for the guide bars and threads of the hardware. The simple method is to use an oil based water dispersant like WD40 occasionaly, but I'd rather not have to clean this off my clothes or work peices if I can help it, so I've been considering non-oil based lubricats also.

I'm thinking natural wax followed by graphite powder; the wax will help to inhibit rust, and graphite powder for free movement. The other benefit of these is that being dry, neither will attract undue dust. Is there a flaw in my thinking, or perhaps an even better way? Honestly, at the rate I use my workshop I'd only need to do this twice a years at most.

Dave.

Originally Posted by kman-oz

I've now seen this mentioned a few times and I'm considering going this way also. Where did you get your leather from and what variety is it, Bob? I imagine pig skin might be a little thin for gluing, but cow hide would be quite good. Thoughts? Oh, um... what glue?

Yeah pigskin is no good.

I went to a shop that makes bikie/leather gear and asked about regular cow hide off cuts. The thickest stuff they in offcuts was 4.5 mm but none of the offcuts were wide enough to do the vice faces in one piece so I bought a piece of second grade hide big enough to do my two vices and had a quite a bit left over for about $40. You could do it quite a but cheaper if you are prepared to use pieces and make up a bit of a jigsaw of it - It should be just as good. The grip the leather provides is pretty amazing and it means you don't have to crush the life out the timber you are trying to hold.

I have used bits from that piece of leather I bought for all manner of things, Mallet faces , removable leather covered vice faces for the cross slider on my DP, and just recently lining those extended jaws I made for a lathe chuck (that's gotta be one of the best home made gizmos I've made in ages - I use them all the time)

The glue I used was regular contact cement, so when you need to replace it, it's not impossible to remove. Epoxy also penetrates the leather and makes it go hard. Glue it with the unfinished side exposed.

Hope that helps.

Hi Dave,

Am in a similar position, that is I need a decent bench. Mine is a wobbly shocker. Like you I have done a lot of research, reading etc. But unlike you I have been procrasta... procristena... just plain SLACK, and not done any more than research.

Hope to see some Work in Progress posts when you organised. Might get some inspiration, maybe, could possibly, perhaps.

Best of luck.

Cheers
Pops

G'day Pops

My current bench is very stable, but I have to do almost everything with clamps, which just plain sucks. It sounds like I have the opposite problem, I'm motiviated, I have the tools and the means, but not the time The bed I'm working on now is about half finished, but it's been almost 1 1/2 years in the making thus far.

I'm making good progress on the bed presently, so I'm expecting to wrap it up shortly after Easter. After Easter I'm onto the bench as a matter of priority.... I can't work without the right tools now can I?

The pics earlier on are the first of many WIP shots

Thanks for offering me luck, but can you offer me some more free time instead?

Dave.

Hi Dave,

Free time??? Hard to come by that stuff is. But, if you were here in Perth I would offer some of my time to assist you in your bench endeavours.

My experience is that a good bench does make the job more enjoyable. A piece of door architrave got removed from the house, (part renovated) to brace the rickety bench, as a temporary measure mind, (for the last 7 years that is). Helped a lot though.

So you really can't do without that new bench. One tip, (or point of view) I might venture is, don't get too hung up on trying to build the 'perfect' bench. Your needs and preferences will change with time and the work you end up doing. So I reckon, just build it, use it and modify it later or build a new one later if things change.

It will be much better than the current bench for certain so more fun to use for certain.

As for tool recesses, I am not a fan. Would prefer to have a chisel caddy like Scribbly Gum made.

All the best.

Cheers
Pops

Originally Posted by Pops

One tip, (or point of view) I might venture is, don't get too hung up on trying to build the 'perfect' bench. Your needs and preferences will change with time and the work you end up doing. So I reckon, just build it, use it and modify it later or build a new one later if things change.

Oh, I couldn't agree more! This will be my fourth bench not counting the bench I built as a teenager at my parents home. The first one was very rough with an engineers vice, the second was a woodworking bench made from a modified dining table, the third is the one I'm sick of now. I'm at the stage where my enthusiasm for the work is dampened by my inability to get what I want from my tools. I reckon this is largely due to my increased use of hand tools without a bench designed for this sort of work. I'm just getting tired of the bench making things harder instead of easier. Every one of them was built to satisfy my then present need.

Most of the work I want to do now is centred around furniture joinery; mortise and tenon, dovetail, paneling... hand planes, chisels, saws. I used to take my timber to a cabinet maker and have it jointed and thicknessed for me, now I do it with hand planes. I used to cut tenons and shallow mortises with a router, now I do them with saws, chisels and a block plane. The growth of my skills now mandates a serious bench to work from.

All I really need in a bench now is a flat reference surface with versatile clamping/vice capacity, i.e. a fairly traditional woodwork bench. That said, in my years of Engineering I learned this simple truth: Spend a penny in design, save a pound in manufacture, save a fortune over the life cycle. Thus, I'll probably expend more mental energy in this phase than any other in the life of the bench.

Take the idea of retrofitting a removable shoulder vice for example, I'll have to design the bench to accept an end cap on the left of the bench and be able to remove and replace the skirt at the front. If I went ahead and built the bench without considering this I'd spend considerable effort later trying to achieve the goal. On the other hand, I can spend relatively little effort now and save myself a lot of trouble later.

Personally I think I present a fair balance between the 'It must be perfect' and 'Just get the bloody thing done' attitudes. I don't waste time planning and thinking unnecessarily, but I don't cowboy it and botch the job either.

I'm getting more serious about woodworking and it's high time I had the tools to match.

Now I'm off to eBay to buy some free time.

Dave.

I'd *almost* finished the bed head yesterday, which is the last serious work required on the bed, so I went out and bought the front vice and tail vice screw.

Attachment 69024Attachment 69025
Here are a couple of shots next to a Pope No.5 for perspective, i.e. there big.



I'll be starting the prep work during the week and working on a SketchUp design over the next few weeks.

Dave.

Hi Dave,

Four benches !? Hell, you are way ahead of me.

I like your approach to this woodworking stuff, and things are on the move for bench 5 I see. Onya !!

Cheers
Pops

How big does one make vice jaws people? I'm thinking 18" or more long, from 3"x6" hardwood with leather faces would be nice. I've found a leather supplier in Melb by the way, they're makers/repairers of bike leathers and have some good size cow hide.

Well, that begs another question really, do I cover only the outer vice face or do I cover the skirt face too? Of course, I'd like to maintain a straight flat skirt face along the entire length of the bench, but a leather face will ruin it. I could recess the leather, but exactly how much to compensate for compression? Do I make the leather removable??

Please excuse my thinking out loud, there a quite a lot of new things to think about on this bench.

Hi k-man - bit slow chipping in, but I've been even busier than usual, lately. I'll add my encouragement to the others' - you are going down a similar road to mine, except you seem to be proceeding a bit more quickly & building a proper tail vise sooner in the bench series than I did - I was up to bench #6 or #7 by the time I first incorporated a 'travelling dog' & found it so useful, I finally built a bench with a 'proper' tail vise, which is even more useful. I do mostly furniture, which requires a lot of handwork, & can confirm that having appropriate holding devices makes life a whole lot more pleasant! Something like 80% of my benchwork takes place at the tail vise end.

WRT to jaw sizes for the front vise - mine is roughly 400mm or so long by 150 deep, maybe a little more. It's a home-made version of the one you just bought. I don't think I've ever wanted the jaws longer. Making them too long will exaggerate any out of parallel issues, and also reduces the clamping pressure you can apply (pressure = force per unit area, after all). You are asking about leather faces on the apron side - I actually put a thin 'jaw' on the apron, reasoning it was easy to replace if it got beaten up. The leather (added later) takes the brunt of things, & after 20 plus years, of use, I see no need to replace the wood, but the leather is certainly due for replacement. Having the inner jaw about 20mm proud of the apron is more often a useful feature, to me, so not sure why you are desperate to keep the apron face as the inner jaw (?).

As someone has already said, there is no such thing as the perfect bench - I've lived with mine for 20-something years, now, and it may end up seeing me out, but I would like to change a few things, so maybe I will make one very last model. I have the material, all I need is time... The main things I would change are having a quick-action front vise (can't fit one on the present bench due to design), put more dog holes in the travelling jaw of the tail vise, & of course, making it just a bit longer and perhaps wider, though width has rarely been an issue, except when I was in very cramped quarters for a while, and the workbench had to be the assembly surface. Length is my main issue - can't quite hold 1.8M in the tail vise/dog system. Not very often that I want to do that, but it's been often enough that I would certainly make a new bench about 400mm longer than the present one.

However, the one thing I have been happy with is the weight & solidity - ya can't make 'em too solid (except when you have to move! ). So don't skimp on the dimensions of any parts. When I made mine, I could just lift the top onto the leg assembly on my own - now I need help, but it's far better that way than chasing it around the shed..........

Cheers,

Thank you for your input Ian.... Apron! I've been calling it a skirt It's all very feminine anyway. (*ducks for cover*)

At 18" long I think my jaws will be only slightly longer than yours. This is a bit of any experiment in trying to expand the vertical clamping capacity of the vice, if it works well enough I may never need a shoulder vice.

As for the flat apron issue, this is one of the things that really works for me on the current bench and I'd like to keep it. Also, I'm looking at how I can clamp very long boards to the apron for jointing using hold-downs on either the bench legs or a moveable vertical batton (don't know what this bit is called.... if my workbench books had arrived already, I would know ). So, for this to work it's much easier with a completely flat, straight apron.

Out of curiosity, what are the dimensions of your bench? At this early stage I've got in mind to make it 600-700mm deep and 2100-2400mm long. I have material to build 700 x 2400, but I don't think I'll need all the space because I'll be using the current bench for construction and glue-ups mostly. And ah, I don't think weight will be a problem My estimate based on dimensions and timber density is between 75kg and 110kg just for the top.... I might be able to lift that by myself, but I have a block and tackle in the workshop too

Regarding the dogs in the tail vice, do you mean to say that you would have put a higher density of dog holes in the vice than that in the bench top? I've seen this in some pictures, but have no idea why. Your valuable input here is more than welcome Ian

Dave.

Originally Posted by kman-oz

.... Apron! I've been calling it a skirt It's all very feminine anyway. (*ducks for cover*)
Dave.

Chris: Both terms seem to be used about equally - I use both! I tend to talk about the skirt on a table (goes all the way round) & I call the front bit on a bench an apron (hangs over the front only). But I'm no authority!

Originally Posted by kman-oz

As for the flat apron issue, this is one of the things that really works for me on the current bench and I'd like to keep it. Also, I'm looking at how I can clamp very long boards to the apron for jointing using hold-downs on either the bench legs or a moveable vertical batton (don't know what this bit is called.... if my workbench books had arrived already, I would know ). So, for this to work it's much easier with a completely flat, straight apron.
Dave.

Ok - gotcha. But you don't HAVE to have a flat apron. If I'm understanding you right, you want to be able to hold long boards on edge for jointing. I do this by sticking one end on edge in the front vise & holding the rear up with a peg stuck into a vertical stud held by the tail vise. A slight inconvenience, as you have to reach for the loose bit & attach it, so some people make a vertical piece that slides in a rack along the front of the bench (you can also use it to support shorter pieces, this way). This would be a niusance to me, as I have a couple of small cupboards under the bench to store the things I want close to hand, & there's no way I could conveniently attach a rack. I used to resist having cupboards under the bench, because you always seem to want something just when you have a large piece of work clamped in front of the cupboard which contains it. However, I was trying to maximise use of space in my new shed, and tired of moving the same few things around the benchtops day in day out, so made these little cupboards. To my surprise, they work quite well, and now the battery drill and similar tools are no longer having to be moved somewhere else every few minutes!

Originally Posted by kman-oz

Regarding the dogs in the tail vice, do you mean to say that you would have put a higher density of dog holes in the vice than that in the bench top? I've seen this in some pictures, but have no idea why. Your valuable input here is more than welcome Ian
Dave.

Exackery. All because of Mr. Murphy, one of who's laws is that any piece of wood you pick up to work on is always either just too short or just too long for the dog spacing you are sitting on at the moment. This means you have to wind in or out to the next spacing. I spaced my dog holes at the same distance as those on the bench (really dumb move, I know, but didn't think it through well enough at the time). A smarter move would have been to space the dog holes in the vise about half the spacing of the benchtop dogs.

I can't remember the exact dimensions of my bench - it HAS been a while since I built it! I'll run the tape over it tonight & get back to you on that one....
Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

... so some people make a vertical piece that slides in a rack along the front of the bench (you can also use it to support shorter pieces, this way).

That's what I'm talking about; has an array of evenly spaced holes for hold-downs. I don't like cupboards under my benches, I never end up using them. I stopped making cupboards and just made low shelves instead... I don't use those either. I think I'd rather use the space for making the bench more versatile and build a couple of free standing tool cabinets eventually.

Twice the density of dog holes in the tail vice, got it.