I
built my bench 40 years ago and wouldn't change very much if
I were to design and build one today. The bench is 78" by
30" and is a little taller than most because I am tall.
The base is fabricated of standard
construction lumber. The top consists of 3/4" thick oak
flooring strips laminated to a 1 3/4" solid core door with
construction mastic. The sides, leg strips, and front apron are
8/4 oak. The drawers are made of select pine.
As you can see from the front view, there are 16 drawers filled with bench accessories and hand tools. An electric outlet is located just under the front apron. The top view of the bench shows the tool well which usually contains a number of bench dogs, spacer blocks, and just about anything else. Two cast iron collars are recessed into the top to accept a Record holdfast.
The quick action front vise uses a half-nut mechanism. It was salvaged from a damaged bench at a local high school and has been fitted with a hardwood face. The tail vise is constructed from an English made 1 1/4" square thread screw and two polished metal rods. The tail vise is often used to grip a vise pad supporting a metal vise, or one of two auxiliary bench top woodworking vises I made to fit the opening. These are very handy when cutting and shaping a tool handle, fine tuning a wooden plane, or trimming small items.
A bench stop has been recessed into the top and is used with the front vise to hold various items. This stop is an antique Charles Morrill patent screw lock model which I found in a used tool shop. My bench dogs are 1 1/4" square pieces of pecan with 3/4" birch dowels cross-pinned with 1/4" dowel stock. I also made some from 3/4" oak dowels with a short length of plastic tubing on the end.
I made a couple of beech hand screws and tapped the front apron to accept these screws. These, used in conjunction with some oak boards of various sizes, provide me with an auxiliary vise to support work in a vertical orientation which is handy when cutting dovetails. They can also be used with spacer blocks to improvise a shoulder vise and to support workbench accessories.
The holes drilled in the leg strips, front apron, and top of my bench provide a number of ways to support work in progress. Long boards are supported with a bench dog or two in the front apron and the front vise. Large panels, such as doors, are supported with the front vise and dogs in both legs. If a panel is not large enough to span both legs, I usually just support the panel on an open drawer.
To prevent racking (straining) the front vise when it engages work on one side only, I have made a number of spacer blocks from scrap of various thickness. Larger blocks provide two different thickness dimensions depending on how they are turned. Each is labeled and drilled to accept a short length of dowel to keep them from falling through the vise. The 1/8" and 3/16" strips are used in combination with others to make up odd dimensions. There are at least two blocks of each size and they are stored in the rear tool well.
The machine dovetailed drawers are made of pine and contain hand tools, such as chisels, augers, knives, layout tools, carving tools, sharpening stones, and a variety of files, rasps, etc.
I built a shallow tool cabinet above the workbench which is described in detail on the Shop Storage page.
I have made a number of bench accessories to protect my bench and assist in hand tool operations. A bench hook is used to prevent cutting into my bench when cross cutting boards. A miter block is used with a back saw to cut miters and a miter shooting board to trim them. A shooting board helps when truing the sides of carcass members. The main purpose of a shooting board is to provide a smooth flat surface to keep a plane square to the edge of a board. Since the mouth opening on a standard bench plane does not extend to the edge of the sole, the plane will not continue to cut the reference edge as the board is trimmed. Winding sticks are used to determine if a board is twisted from one end to the other.
Several visitors to my website have requested plans or measured drawings of my workbench. I did not keep my original construction drawings, but I finally gave in and drew up some dimensioned sketches of the bench. If you are interested in how the bench was built, you can visit the page containing Bench Detail.
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