For the past 20 years I have been working with kinda flat horizontal surfaces as work benches. For the most part, that is all that anyone really needs but a nice solid and genuinely flat surface has been on my wish list for quite some time. So the time and opportunity has come and I will be commencing the build next weekend. I have a couple big stacks of terribad Tasmanian Oak. The stack on my bench has been laying outside in the mud at work for the past 10 years. It was the support structure for a old dust extractor tower. It is F17 laminated structural hardwood beams. Technically the glue joints will probably still be OK, but I plan to rip all the joints apart and end up with a bunch of sticks which I will then laminate into my required sizes. A bunch of work I know, but life is work and the only escape is sad.
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The stack of timber above is my longer length stuff which will yield the two laminated bench tops and the longer rails.
I also have another stack of F17 hardwood offcuts from work. I've already gone through the stack and removed what I could to use on cutting boards, but most of it is loaded with gum vein and grain collapse, checking etc etc. It is 120x35 and 140x35 but I will re-machine it all anyway. It's good stuff to use for the legs which I will laminate as well as anything else I need such a shelf pieces.
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Given that I've had plenty of time to plan this, I have purchased my vice hardware before building. A HNT Gordon face vice and a HNT Gordon tail vice. They're really great pieces of kit. I'm always surprised and jealous of the level of work that engineering can produce. I "can" do the same level of work with wood, but once I look at it or worse, breath on it, all my good work was for nothing.
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I have made complete detailed drawings of my bench using Fusion 360 for the first time. The learning curve is steep, even for a bloke like myself, but boy is it a great program! I can draw a bench like this in SketchUp in about 15 minutes, but although complete in every way, it just doesn't have the crispness or the easy changes to basic things like length and height like Fusion does. My Fusion drawings have probably got about 80 hours worth of work/learning in it and I'm sure I haven't been using best practices. If it works, then it works and I'll be happy with that. At least now, I can draw things in Fusion fairly trouble free, and when I hit trouble I know what the hell I did wrong and can fix it..eventually.
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The drawings above (they are drawings...unless you believe I made my bench and shipped it to Death Valley :D ), are styled with White Ash and Walnut. I'll be using Tasmanian Oak and probably some of my special reserve super sweet figured Redgum to give it a pop of colour and contrast. The White Ash and Walnut does look super nice, but my Tassie Oak is free and free trumps everything.
I have no intention of adding drawers under the bench. I have plenty of dumping areas in my garage and house that I don't crave or even need extra storage. The shelf will be used to hold my bench tools like chisels, planes, measuring stuff etc (that's the plan, it'll last 5 minutes...). I have splayed the legs out slightly to make the bench less prone to racking along its length. The timber sizes and tenon lengths are enough to overcome this, but how much extra work is a "slightly" angled mortise and tenon really? :D I've also chosen to use a full apron under the 75mm thick top. The top is self-supporting at this thickness and over this span, but better is better and I'll only be building one.
The full build will be filmed and put on YouTube for those interested. I'll mostly get this built over Christmas holidays but I want to start next weekend so I have a small chance of having a day off this year. A day at the beach sounds good.
The only thing I am unsure of is where I will put the bench. I'm gonna build it first and hope it will fit in the space that I think it will. Otherwise I may have a panel saw for sale :D