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I don’t know what is making me procrastinate on this bench. I think maybe it was the hand planing that was a part of this next step. Well anyway, it wasn’t that hard – I just had to make the tenons on the long stretchers a bit narrower so they’d fit nice and snug in the mortises. Not too hard.
Next step – whittling some pegs for drawboring the stretchers, and at the same time getting a start on laminating the benchtop!
Wow, that was tedious. Sawing through a 6″ x 6 1/2″ with a ryoba was no joke.
Then I had to flatten the bottom. Not too bad. Creating the chamfers on the bottom of the legs was fun, though.
Then I weighed the leg with my luggage scale just for kicks.
All four legs are done. Next: fitting the long stretchers!
P.S. The post title is my general feeling after seeing my legs lying horizontally on the ground for such a long time. It’s good to see them upright!
So I’m done with my leg glue-up on all four legs. The mortises were really the thing I was dreading most, and now they’re done. And my left front leg has a nice 2 1/4″ hole to accomodate the wood screw for the leg vise. That was a beast to do with an expansive bit. My chest is still sore from the bit brace, and I was even using a board to better distribute the pressure.
Right now I’m en route to Germany for a conference. Will be back on Saturday. Then I’ll finish off the legs. I have to cut them down to size (from the bottom, of course) and chamfer them at the base. Then I’ll fit the long stretchers into the legs and drawbore them. No glue. And maybe at the same time, I’ll start on the benchtop glueup.
I’m basically going to glue together the interior 10 boards (leaving a void to accomodate the planing stop). Once I’ve done that, I’ll know the exact dimensions of my short stretchers and will go ahead and fit those into the legs (again, drawboring, no glue). And then I’ll start gluing up the outer boards, leaving the voids for the through tenons on the legs.
Feels like it’s coming together! Auf Wiedersehen…
Today it’s back to the glueup phase of my build. I’ve glued up half of the boards for each leg and done the short stretcher mortises for each. Now it’s time to glue the other half of the boards on, and voids in the glueup will create the mortises for the long stretchers. Here’s the first layer just after clamping, with a closeup:
Then I glued an identical layer onto that one (both pieces), and voila, a mortise for the long stretcher. The last two boards closed up this mortise, and the long stretchers will go all the way through. The short stretcher will stop just short of where the long stretcher goes through.
To determine the size of the mortise, by the way, I clamped the top piece on the leg, laid the long stretcher out in its place and snugged the bottom piece up against it. Then I removed the stretcher, scooched the bottom piece up the tiniest bit, and marked it there. Worked perfectly. My initial dry fit shows that the stretcher will either go in with a bit of persuasion, or will require some minor paring to get it to fit. Fine by me.
One leg done (minus cutting the bottom to size). Ha, look at all those colors, this will be one mutt of a workbench! 
I hope to finish all four legs by the end of the week, as I’m going to Germany next week for a conference.
So in my last post, I mentioned the difficulty I was having boring the overlapping holes for the mortises that will receive the short stretchers of my bench. I was tired, but wasn’t gonna let it breaka my stride.
This past Thursday was a federal holiday, and my wife graciously gave me the space and time to get in a lot of shop time. So I started with the flip side of the first mortise (from the last post) and was able to complete that and the mortises in two other legs. But when I was halfway through the last mortise, my expansive bit snapped under the immense power of my massive arms. Well, either that, or it got tired of being overextended beyond its intended range. Anyway, the screw head just snapped right off the shaft. Cool.
Or not cool. Because now what? I tested some of my other bits and they were entirely unsatisfactory in their cutting ability. Not only did I have this one last short stretcher mortise to finish, but I still had to do my big honkin’ mortise for the nut to my wooden screw (the nut is 6″ x 3 1/2″, and 3″ or so thick). So I did what I thought I’d never do – I reached for a power tool: specifically, our office’s electric drill.
Even as I was taking this thing home, I felt kinda dirty. Here I am, building a workbench in the style of the 18th-century, and I can’t even do it without plugging something in. But you know, once I plugged it in and gave it a spin (or a twist, I suppose), it wasn’t so bad. The speed of boring was quite nice.
So anyway, in no time I finished that last leg and was ready to move on to the big mortise for the honkin’ nut. Got some pics. First off I marked the four corners.
Then it was a simple matter of drilling holes with one hole space in between them. Then I followed up with drilling out those spaces until I had a perimeter of nearly-overlapping holes. Then the fun: drilling in at angles along the perimeter to hog out the thin walls of wood in between the holes. In no time the block in the middle dropped onto the floor, without a chisel being struck. Of course, then the chisel came out to clean up the walls.
I was surprised at how easy this was, considering how much I’d been dreading this mortise. While my holes were not drill-press vertical, they were pretty darn close. And with this mortise it really doesn’t matter what it looks like, nor does it have to be perfect in respect to the nut that goes into it. Standards may be very low and it will still function exactly as it should. Still, I was very very pleased that the nut went into the mortise with the gentlest of mallet taps. In the picture below, you’re looking at the inside of the leg, where the screw will come out. To fill in the space behind the nut, I’ll insert a couple little blocks and hold them against the nut with a thin strip of wood screwed onto the leg. Not a drop of glue needed. And in case you weren’t sure, the back side of this “through mortise” will be closed up with the remaining boards that need to be glued on to complete the leg (and then a hole drilled through to receive the screw).
Since my last post, I’ve done some preparations for traveling, traveling, and recovering from traveling, so I haven’t had much shop time. Last night I had an hour or two. I had been considering building my double-screw Moxon vise for the Instructables woodworking contest. Nice prizes! But I figured I’d better stay focused and try to make more progress on the bench.
Next step: mortising the legs for the short stretchers. In my last post I suggested that it’d be “easy” to just drill pilot holes at the midpoint of each wall of the mortise and then insert a hacksaw blade in the hole, and to cut from the hole towards each corner of the mortise. Well, that wouldn’t work. The hacksaw blade is just not agressive nor accurate enough to do the trick. Back to Plan B – which is Plan A for most of you: drill holes (overlapping, if possible) and then clean out the waste with a chisel.
Easier said than done.
A few things make this a tough task. First and most importantly, I don’t have the right-sized bit. Ideally, the hole will extend from one wall to the other, right? Well I have two expansive bits: one that extends to 1 1/2″ and the other which starts at 1 3/4″. Guess what width my mortise is? Yup – in between those two. So what I’ve had to do is to overextend my smaller bit, which mostly works, but after each hole I have to readjust the bit which has slipped because the screw can’t tighten the bit quite enough.
Another difficulty is boring with a large bit through 4″ of hardwood with a bit brace. Quite the workout! So last night I didn’t make too much progress. I figured out what bit to use and how far to extend it. And I got started on one side of one leg (see above). Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get very far in the center hole before the bit refused to stay in the pilot hole any longer. Next – most likely today or this evening – I’ll flip the leg over and finish the mortise – hoping my marks are lined up!
I’d pretty much run out of excuses for not starting the Big Bench Build. Every week at church I see the kind woman who arranged for me to get all that beautiful lumber for free. I always fear the question, “So have you built it yet?” Don’t ask me why it has been hard to motivate myself to do it. I think maybe it’s because I’ve been planning this workbench for years – literally – and in my head maybe it’s become this grand opus that, despite it being one of my very first projects, must somehow be my best.
I’m past that now.
This isn’t fine furniture; it’s a big rustic wooden table. Once I realized that, I was able to relax. Instead of saying to myself, “I’m building a Roubo-Moxon workbench,” I’m saying, “I’m gluing this board to that board.” And without me even really noticing, I’ve got long stretchers and two of my legs are halfway completed.
But let me back up a bit. Here’s my order of tasks for the build:
- Long stretchers: Done. These are four 1x4s glued together. The inner two are longer and will tenon through the legs.
- Legs: These will be eight 1x6s glued together, alternating two short with two long. The long ones will tenon through the top (with the outer tenons being dovetails).
- Benchtop: I’ll glue up the 1x4s from the inside of the benchtop to the outside. Once I reach the through tenons on the legs I’ll know exactly how long my short stretchers need to be. The mortises in the benchtop will be created by leaving voids in my glueup. The dovetail mortises are the only ones I’m really worried about.
- Short stretchers: I’ll already have cut the mortises in the legs so this should be pretty straightforward.
- Accessories: Leg vise, crochet, double-screw vise (Moxon).
I don’t have any pics of my long stretchers. Not very interesting. So then it was time to figure out the layout of my 32 boards for the 4 legs. Here’s what I was looking at, trying to sort it all out (the long boards are two pieces each):
Some boards are super light, I’m talking balsa light. Why? Dunno. But I have those boards as the load-bearing pieces, always paired with a normal board. I have a few sapwood boards, which will be the interior through tenons – those will be my “anvils” on the benchtop. And the prettiest boards were moved to be the outermost “show” pieces. The colors of my show pieces – the long stretcher, the legs, the benchtop – may not match, but I don’t care. They’ll look nice. 
So here are the 32 pieces, in the general shape of my legs:
I’m gluing them up from inside to outside. And while most people say that there are two ways to create a mortise – chopping and boring – I am going to see about a third way: sawing. I’m going to test it on scrap but here’s the plan: Once I have the innermost four boards glued up (3″), I will drill a hole in the midpoint of each edge of the mortise, so that the outside of the hole is the outside of the mortise. Then I’ll slide a hacksaw blade in there and saw from the hole to one corner of the mortise. Repeat until you’ve reached all the corners, and bang, instant mortise! I may clamp some metal rulers on each side to guide the saw, not sure yet. This technique would only work because of the way I’m gluing up my legs. Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on this.
So for now, I’m gluing up the innermost four boards of all four legs. Then I’ll get to work on the mortises for the short stretchers, and the mortise for the nut to the leg vise. Then I can glue the rest of the leg pieces together, leaving voids for the long stretcher tenons along the way.
It is all crystal clear in my mind. What about in yours?
(click on the pic for a full-size view)
So here’s the bench mostly as I see it. My apologies for the faintness, but I think you get the idea. I forgot to put the crochet on there, so that would naturally be on the front left of the benchtop.
You’ll also notice that I have no vises on the bench. I’m not entirely convinced that the bench needs them, although I do plan on making a removable twin-screw vise à la Moxon (not pictured). I had planned on installing a wagon vise, and have the hardware already, but when I included it into the sketch it just looked wrong. It rubbed me the wrong way, I can’t say why – maybe all those dogholes? If I regret it, I’ll retrofit it like The Schwarz did. I’m still up in the air about the leg vise. I can retrofit that too, although it’s a bit harder perhaps.
I also ditched the sliding deadman. Sure, I might need something to support long boards for planing, etc. But I have no [easy] way to make grooves, so installing the sliding deadman would actually be one of the most complex parts of making the bench. And I just don’t feel like doing it. If I need something like that later on, I’ll hammer two pieces of wood together, with holes drilled in the vertical piece, and bam! – bench slave.
So essentially I’ve taken most of the design of the Roubo, discarded the Schwarzifications of it (although the leg vise is also Roubo), and added a dash of Moxon.
Tell me what you think!
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