Thread: WIP Shaker Workbench with Split Top

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Coming along really nicely, Mike; be careful of over-polishing it as it is already a super risky project - as in .....

"That would look nice in the living room..."

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

Coming along really nicely, Mike; be careful of over-polishing it as it is already a super risky project - as in .....

"That would look nice in the living room..."

Thanks Graeme. There's no danger of that, but it has crossed my mind that it would make a great kitchen island bench once I'm pushing up daisies. In fact, if I do ever downsize and build again, I would build something similar that could perform double duty as both a kitchen prep bench and a woodworking bench. But instead of a leg vice, I'd go for a twin screw vice at the front as well as on the end. I'd probably have to increase the overhang on the front to accommodate bar stools. As it is, it's about 140mm and it would probably need to be at least 200~250mm.

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To my surprise somehow I was able to find room for all that Blackbutt without having to move brackets and re-jigging things. Gotta love the Unistrut system!!!


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A few of the pieces had some quite striking figuring very similar to the FB Tas Oak but on a larger scale. It seems a bit of a waste to use them for a laundry cabinet......



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Anyhoo......what it means is I'm back on schedule and I'm ready to cut the tails and the reason for this post is to canvas everyone's opinion on whether I should go with a pair of dovetails per corner or continue with 3 as per the middle and bottom rows. I'm genuinely undecided. As with all opinions, there is no right or wrong answer so please don't be shy in expressing yours. I'm planning on cutting the tails tomorrow so I need people to reply before then if they could.

And before anyone mentions it, yes, I'm gonna use London pins again. Not for aesthetic reasons as such, but more to practise some more. I simply was not happy with my first results and I wanted another go and I'm gonna try a few different techniques this time around.



Cheers,

Mike

Aesthetically I prefer the dovetail drawing on the right.

beautiful figure, surely there’s a way to showcase it? Could you incorporate some sheetgoods in the laundry and keep the figured bb

Originally Posted by AndrewPatrol

Aesthetically I prefer the dovetail drawing on the right.

beautiful figure, surely there’s a way to showcase it? Could you incorporate some sheetgoods in the laundry and keep the figured bb

Thanks Andrew. I think I agree with you. It's more work, but I did say I wanted more practise after all.


As for the figured BB, I haven't really planned that far ahead but I'm sure there'll be a way to showcase it in someway. Probably the drawer fronts or the cupboard door panels.

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The faces and sides for the drawers are prepped and ready for the tails to be cut tomorrow. The sides have been rebated because I find it easier for registration purposes when it comes time to mark out the pins and I need all the help I can get. The shallow rebate also hides any raggedness or break out on the baseline of the pin board.


I thought I'd outline the steps I follow when cutting out shallow rebates for the benefit of the "noobs" and those still very much learning which I count myself in that category. What institutional knowledge I have has been gained from watching YouTube videos, reading blogs/threads in this very forum (as well as others), and from trial and error. As someone who has learnt by standing on the shoulders of giants, what I've unfortunately discovered is the most skilled and talented don't often make the greatest of teachers. Often, the best teachers are those where things don't come easy and have had to struggle. They are the ones more likely to understand the struggles of the average Joes. The more advanced or skilled the craftsman, the more likely they are to skip or gloss over some steps. For example, you may have the craftsman tell you the benefits of cutting a shallow rebate when dovetailing, but they'll most likely skip the part about how to actually cut the aforementioned rebate. To them it's so simple a task that it's not even worth mentioning at all. But to someone like me who is very much still learning, a badly cut rebate may throw the joint off and either results in gaps or worse, a corner that isn't square.


DISCLAIMER:

Before I outline my process, I'd like to make a few things clear:

1) I am a novice so keep that in mind if you choose to follow me.
2) I'm not saying that it's even necessary to follow all the steps that I do, or if it's even necessary to employ a shallow rebate at all. Many more skilled woodworkers than I do not and they produce much crispier joints then I ever could. Do whatever works for you.
3) There are many methods for cutting rebates and I'm not claiming that my way is the best way. I am simply outlining how I go about cutting shallow rebates. If the rebates were deeper or wider, I would probably use a different method or tool.
4) My process is always being refined. As I said, I'm still very much learning, and I'm sure how I do things in the future will be slightly different to how I do things now. In fact, the way I cut shallow rebates has changed significantly since my first batch of drawers in this very build less than a month ago.


With that out of the way.....

Step 1

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Make sure the end of the tail board is square to the edge and to the face. It may sound obvious, but earlier in my development I wasn't even checking the squareness to the face. One other thing I should mention is at this point I decide which edge to reference from. Don't get me wrong, I check both edges are square to the end (if one edge is square but the other is not, then something must have gone wrong when cutting the board to width because it means the 2 edges are not parallel with each other). What I mean by choosing a reference edge is deciding whether to have the bottom or the top of the drawers as the reference edge. For example, for my bottom row and middle row or drawers, I chose the bottom as the reference edge. That meant when it came to mark out the pins, I would line up the bottom edge of the pin board (i.e. drawer faces) with the edge of the tail board (i.e. drawer sides) that would be at the bottom of the drawer running on the drawer slides. This meant the bottom of the drawer should be pretty much flush after it has been assembled and glued. I usually gut the sides a touch wider than the faces so it would result in the drawer sides slightly protruding at the top. When it came time to fit the assembled drawer, I'd just do minimal passes on the drawer bottom and plane the top edges until I got the desired fit. With the top row of drawers, I cannot use the bottom edge of the drawers as the reference because the Purpleheart handle is on the very top and it would mean shaving the handle when it came time to fit the drawer. So for the top row I'll be referencing from the top.


Step 2

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Use a marking gauge to score a baseline around all 4 sides of each end. My favorite tool for this is the Jessem Sabre Marking Gauge. There are many marking gauges out there, and I haven't tried all of them, but I really like the Jessem because it has a wide fence for registration and is indexable with fine repeatable adjustments. IMO it's only downside is its price, but nothing is cheap nowadays and you get what you pay for. My goal is to achieve quite a deep line so that I don't have to deploy the knicker on my rebate block plane. I'm quite heavy handed and the mistake I often make is taking too deep a first cut instead of multiple light passes. I partly blame the Youtubers I follow because they make it look so effortlessly. I have to keep reminding myself that they're American/Canadian/Japanese/English and the wood they are using are quite soft when compared to our Aussie hardwoods. Even this plantation grown TasOak from Bunnies is probably harder then what most of them are using. One tool I'd like to try is a Japanese marking gauge. I believe their marking gauges are made from much harder carbon steels and may be a match for our tough woods.


To those that may be wondering, for my 22mm (ish) thick drawer faces, I set my baseline (i.e. the length of my dovetails) to 15mm leaving a 6mm rear wall allowing a mm for final planing/sanding.



Step 3

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Next I cut the rebate and my tool of choice for this task is my LN Skew Rebate Block Plane. I find the slicing cut of the skewed blade offers me better control. I start off taking partial shavings starting from the end of the rebate and slowly increasing the length of my cut until I'm able to take full shavings. There's a bit of learning curve with this plane both in set up and in use. When I first used it I struggled to get a level rebate. Often the rebate would be deeper near the shoulder. I initially thought it was because I didn't have the blade protruding evenly but I now think it's because the acute point of the blade had a tendency to dig in causing a heavier cut on the left side. It's one of the reasons I bought the non-skewed rebate block plane (H Eckert version) because I thought it would be easier to achieve a level rebate. If you have a look at my posts for the bottom row of drawers, you may even see it in the background of some of the photos. But since then, I've found that with practise, my results with the LNSRBP has improved significantly to the point it's the only plane I used to cut the rebates for the top row.



Step 4:

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Check that the rebate is level by checking that the bottom is square with the end of the board. Note that the ruler of square is not extended all the way to the shoulder. This is because I'm using the square to check for squareness (duh!!!) and not the width of the rebate. The shoulder of the rebate at this stage is not "clean" and may have unsevered wood fibres or other detritus that could throw off the reading. When I was cutting the rebates for the bottom drawers, I really struggled getting a level floor on my rebate. Often it would go from being deeper at the shoulder to then deeper at the edge due to overcompensation by me. With this last batch of drawers, I was pleasantly surprised that my planing technique has greatly improved to the point that all 12 rebates were perfectly level and square to the ends. It's proof that practise does indeed make perfect.



Step 5:

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I check with a digital caliper that I have consistent thickness after rebating and that I have achieved my desired thickness. In this case my aim is 16mm. The board is probably 18mm thick which means the rebate is around 2mm deep.



To be continued.....

.......Apparently my post exceeded the word limit so I had to break it up!!


Step 6:

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Clean up the shoulder. I find the best tool for such a shallow rebate is the marking gauge. I suppose you could use a shoulder plane, and if the rebate was say 5mm deep, It's probably the tool I would use. There is a risk of widening the rebate or making it not square with the edge if you use the shoulder plane.



Step 7:

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I mark the end with the thickness of the dovetail. This info will be important when it comes time to cut the pin sockets. I also use this info in Step 8 when it comes time to cutting the rebate at the other end of the board. For 16mm thick dovetails, I will aim to cut the pin sockets 15 ~ 15.5mm deep. This should leave the dovetails proud of the pins negating the need for clamping pads when it comes time to glue and clamp everything together. It also minimises the amount to be taken off the pin boards (i.e. drawer faces) when cleaning up the joints. This is an important consideration when trying to achieve a "piston" fit but not so much in this application.



Step 8:

Cut the rebate on the other end and make sure it's on the same side/face. DAMHIK. Also, make sure the depth of the rebate (i.e. the thickness of the dovetails) is the same as that on the other end. If they're not the same, then it would result in a slightly trapezoidal drawer. This isn't a huge problem and is easily overcome when planing the sides of the drawer for final fitment of the drawers into their slots. The inside of the drawer will still be trapezoidal but the outside should be rectangular after final fitment. It's just something to keep in mind if you're using a square on the inside faces to determine the squareness of the drawer, or if you're going to be adding drawer inserts.



Ok...I think that's pretty much it. I hope I haven't come across as some sort of woodworking know it all telling people how to suck eggs. As I've stated repeatedly, I am very much a novice still learning my craft and I value it greatly when more experienced craftsmen/women detail their techniques and processes (including thought processes). Hopefully other people in a similar situation as me finds some value from my post.




Cheers,
Mike

I identified 2 key areas with my first attempt at London pins: sawing of the dovetails and marking out the pins. There were problems with other aspects of my process, but these 2 areas were the ones that needed urgent attention. My sawing left ragged walls to the dovetails which affected the marking out of the pins. The tiny pin sockets also meant I couldn't get my marking knife to mark the outline of the dovetails. This meant I was kinda guessing where the lines were when it came time to excavate the mortices.

As per my earlier post, I was unable to use the table saw to cut the tails as the kerf is too wide and the result would not be London pins. This time around, I decided to cut the tails with my bandsaw. It's what I should have done the first time but I was too lazy to move all the crap I was storing on it and dig the bandsaw out of that corner of the workshop.



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First step is to make a jig by drawing a 1:6 slope on some scrap piece of MDF and I cut it on the tablesaw by sticking it to a scrap piece of ply as a makeshift sled. I then attach a small hardwood strip on the wide end of the jig for the drawer side to hook on to.......


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....like so. It's important to treat the jig and the drawer side as one piece including when retracting the drawer side from the still rotating blade. DAMHIK !!!


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This is the result after just a 15~20 minutes. It's so easy and fast because you don't have to lay out each piece. I just move the fence to align the blade with my first cut on the 1st board and then I just flip the drawer sides in both directions (side to side and then back to front). Note that if your drawer sides are slightly different widths from drawer to drawer, then the pins will be different sizes. My sides had a variance of 2mm from drawer to drawer which is why some of my pin sockets are smaller than the others. The bottom board is the board that I used to align the fence so it has the smallest pin sockets. I can tell the bottom board is my layout board because one of the tails has a corner chewed out when I retracted the workpiece independently of the jig.



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I also used the band saw to cut the shoulders of the boards. This did a much better job than I could have with my Dozuki, but it counted for nought as my chiselwork let me down again. I really have to take more care.


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To mark out the pins, I ditch the marking knife and instead I use a chisel. The LN's are simply too thick for this job but luckily one of my Japanese chisels was just thin enough to fit in most of the pin sockets.


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For the tiniest pin sockets, I sacrifice an old Stanley chisel to the dovetailing gods. Don't worry, it wasn't one of the collectable Stanley's. It's not pretty (bloody thing has more facets than a handful of diamonds!), but it does the job. I've also included a photo of my dovetail alignment board for those that may be interested. I recycled some 32mm MDF scrap leftover from my router sled when flattening the top. It's 32cm wide as I didn't think I'd need to dovetail any boards wider than that but I'll probably be proven wrong about that. It has a ply fence on both the left and right sides so that I can eiter reference the bottom or to edge of the boards.

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Above is a photo of the tiniest of pin sockets with my 5mm Japanese chisel and LN 1/8" chisel for reference. The 5mm will only fit across the baseline so I could only use it for the final cut and not hog out the waste otherwise it's sides will bruise the sides of the tails. I use the LN 1/8" to hog out the waste.





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My aim when marking out the pins with the chisels is to just lightly mark the masking tape. As such, I don't use a mallet/hammer and instead I just push down lightly with my hand. The reason for this is because the bevel side of the chisel is on the wrong side of the line, i.e. the bevel is not on the waste side. Note: the baseline is marked with a marking gauge. As you can tell from the photo above, the masking tape is prone to tearing when a marking gauge is used. To combat this, I've now started marking the baseline before applying the masking tape. Once the line is deep enough, I stick on the tape and then do a light pass with the marking gauge just deep enough to cut the tape.


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I then go back and reinforce the marks with a light tap from the Gennou and chisel but this time with the bevel on the waste side.



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It's not idiot-proof because this blind idiot managed to miss the mark. Luckily I can usually tell when I've missed because there'll be a thin strip of blue tape that remains when I remove it from the waste areas. But generally speaking, it's a vast improvement from my first attempt.



To be continued......

To hog out the waste, I stick with my previous method of using a trim router with a 6mm upcut spiral bit.....



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But I got sick and tired of clamping pads and sacrificial boards to my moxon vise so I made a couple of clamping boards that can just ride on the vice screws. The piece of Tassie Oak is just double-taped to the board and is a sacrificial piece so that I can re-use the clamping pads. Plus I don't want to rout into MDF if I can avoid it.



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In an effort to achieve optimum results, I decide to get comfortable. Above is my set up for those interested. I have the back wall of the mortices nearest to me. I find this gives me the greatest visibility and maximum control. Dust control is not and option for my trim router, but even if it was, I'd probably ditch it for greater visibility. To protect my lungs, I use a half respirator and have the wall fan behind me hopefully blowing the fine dust particles away. The air hose also helps with this as well as getting rid of the chips. I use 2 Dewalt work lights with one laying on it's side to direct the lumens to where I need it. The LEM barstool makes a great kitchen/breakfast bar stool, but I can do with a proper workshop stool. That's on my list of projects.........one day.



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After hogging out the waste with the router, I convert my end vise for chiselwork. This involves replacing the TasOak sacrificial piece with a thicker piece that allows for the board to sit higher whilst providing clearance for the protruding handle. The workpiece sitting higher up on the vice allows for a wooden clamp to support the half pins and prevents them from possibly breaking when the chisel is levered against them. The board is also spun around so the back wall is furthest from where I'm sitting. I am aware that most of the experts advise to sit to the side of the board to better gauge the plumbness of the chisel when chopping down on the back wall. I have tried that, but I find this is what works for me best. Again, I'm only sharing what I do and I'm not saying that it's necessarily the best way for everyone. The 2 mortices on the left is normally what I strive to achieve in regards to how close I get to the baseline. I'm not sure what happened to the one on the left. And I should mention that the only reason why I try to this close to the baseline is because of the problem I was getting when cleaning up the back wall when it happens to land in the FB Tas Oak instead of the predictable plantation-grown stuff from Bunnies.


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The changes I've made to my process appears to have made a huge difference and I've noticed a significant improvement. The above result is now the norm. The 2nd photo is the tightness of fit I usually strive for. The board is tapped in with a mallet or the ball of my hand and usually this means the joint is tight enough to support the cantilevered board. Note: the 2 pics above are of different boards.


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My improvements are gradual and by my last set of drawers, I manage to get the tightness of fit I'm after without undercutting the walls resulting in the telltale holes at the base of the London pins.....


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......but it doesn't mean I'm now suddenly immune from the occasional FUBAR !!! I dunno what happened here. I have no excuse or explanation for how I came to stuff this up so bad. Thankfully these are happening less often.


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I wish I could say the same about this, but I'm resigned to being one of those messy workers and things are likely gonna fall off the bench. Fortunately corner is just dinged and the half pin didn't break off.



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The last drawer is still in the clamps......



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.......and while I wait for it to dry, I move on to tidying up the faces.


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I think everyone has had their fill of my before and after dovetails photos, so I'll skip that this time and leave you of the corner with the FUBARed London Pin and what it looks like after my makeshift repair and freshly planed clean. I jammed a sliver which I surprisingly had the foresight to cut various thickness on my tablesaw prior to the glue up. The split in the drawer side must have been there from the beginning and not a result of too tight a joint. If it was due to too tight a joint, it would normally emanate from the corner of a pin and not smack bang in the middle of a dovetail. If anything, the dovetail wedging into the mortice has closed the split somewhat. The split doesn't extend the whole thickness of the board and must have been a result from the board drying too fast in the kiln. I've wicked som thin CA into the split and am considering reinforcing it with a butterfly tie or two if the split worsens.


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Anyhoo.....it's onto cleaning up the drawer faces and shaping the handles after the top row of drawers are cleaned up and fitted into their locations.






Cheers,
Mike

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The top row of drawers have been cleaned up and fitted into their slots and I have a drawerful of shavings to show for it !! Actually, those shavings are just from the first 2 drawers. The drawer that they're in is the 3rd drawer. It sure was a workout in Brissy's current heat wave.


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The real reason for this post is to share a "special feature" of my bench that I have just "discovered". I'm not sure why realising that I could use the drawers for support was a Eureka moment for me, but it tickled me pink and I just had to share it. In all my research on workbenches, I hadn't come across anyone using their bench drawers in this way before. There's probably a reason why and I'll probably find out why this may be a bad idea. Of course, this "feature" is not unique to my bench. I'm sure every bench with drawers underneath would have this built in feature. Anyhoo......back to tidying up the drawer faces and shaping the handles.




Cheers,
Mike

It is something I do too. Never put any thought into it. It just seemed like something you would do

The only problem is you inevitably end up with shavings or dust in the drawer.

Thanks Mark. I was sure I hadn't "invented" something. And it's reassuring to hear that someone else uses their drawers for this purpose.

It never occurred to me before until it came time to clean up the bottom row of drawers which are too tall to fit in any of my vices and I had to figure out another way to secure it to the bench. As for shavings and sawdust in the drawers, that's what the air compressor is for .

I would avoid using that feature for things involving much downward force - hammering on, chopping mortices etc. Don't want to damage your drawer / runners.

Thanks Pippin. I'll be sure not to use it for any such activities. Cheers.