22 - How to Make an Extreme Woodworking Bench for under $200

[Music] hi everyone my name is James and today I'm going to show you how I built a woodworking bench for most woodworkers a workbench like this is the focal point of their workshop these things are so expensive that buying one is practically out of the question for most of us and even building one with a four-inch thick maple top can cost two thousand dollars or more so I decided to go the route of buying Douglas fir lumber from my local big-box store now it took a while to pick through the lumber and find boards that were very straight and I was also trying to find boards that were heavy and high-density now this was kiln dried so the heavier ones I knew were the high-density ones I also looked for boards that had no knots on one side so that the top of my bench would be not free I built the whole table out of two by sixes and I had to buy a variety of links in order to get enough straight boards I do offer a comprehensive set of plans and that's available in the link and from those I threw some rough dimensions down on my assembly table with for me to keep track of as the build goes along after getting all of my boards to the approximate length I jointed one edge [Music] my youngest daughters in the shop with me today of course like usual and she always gives me hand when I have a lot of jointing and planning to do it speeds things up but she really has a good time after getting one straight edge on the jointer I ripped the other side parallel on the table saw then it's back to the jointer in order to get one face perfectly flat and my oldest daughter is in the shop helping us today as well once we have one side flat it's off to the planer for the final milling operation to get the other side parallel to that first once the milling is done we're now dealing with lumber that is perfectly straight square flat and parallel on all sides and it's so much easier to work with yeah sometimes I'm not sure if she likes the camera more or Woodworking more all of this planning and jointing really generates a lot of wood chips whenever I have clean wood shavings that come from a lumber species that is not toxic I always save them and we donate them to our local Animal Shelter and here we are getting ready for our first blue up what we're building is a split-top roubo style bench so it's going to be built in two sections like this with a split down the middle and we're going to glue up the first half now if you've seen other videos of mine you know I like to use a lot of glue and today will be no exception it seems to me when you have a great big surface area and a whole lot of glue to spread the fastest thing to do is to put on nitrile gloves and just do it by hand also gluing things up that way makes it go much faster so if you've got a big project to glue up this can really help you out and if we have a really big area to clamp we have to remember that it takes a lot of clamps to get enough pressure to ensure that it's clamped down securely I let this dry overnight and then I took the clamps off and I went about scraping the big chunks and beads of excess glue off of it before I took it over to my planer I have a 15 inch planer so I can do a 14 or 15 inch wide section but depending on the size of your planer you might have to make this in to view ups to smaller view ups and then put them together after the fact once that's done I take it over to the jointer to get both sides so basically we will treat the second half the same way as the first and after about two days we have the two sides of our split-top roubo workbench since i'm tired to move in those heavy things around i'm going to jump over to the legs and i'll come back later and show you just how heavy those were and we're just going to follow the same procedure here we're going to start by rough cutting everything to the same length about an inch or two over and then joint it plane it and cut it parallel [Music] while I'm at it I'm just doing the same thing with all of the rails that I'm doing here with the legs I'm going to go ahead and do the legs up first and here's how that procedure goes you notice the bad tear out probably on the edges of some of those boards and that's actually okay because these leg pieces are actually wider than the legs and those are going to be ripped off in the operation later and if you look real carefully there you can see we have just exactly the right amount of glue I'm going to go ahead and put all four leg assemblies into a single clamping stack to save on some clamps so hopefully I can get all the legs and rails clamped up today obviously this operation is easier if you have somebody helping you out and I did in fact get all of the legs and rails clamped up today but that's all the parallel clamps I had so I left out this also I let dry overnight I came back in the morning and unclamped it and started my next milling operation they pretended to be a little bit stuck together but they were just kidding the first step again is of course just to get one perfectly straight edge and if you fight enough clamping pressure you can see that they typically will glue up quite nicely next time over to the table saw to risk the other end parallel to the first I do happen to have a 12 inch blade so I'm able to just barely get through the stacks if you have a smaller blade a 10 inch blade it's no problem you just rip half of it flip the board over and with the other half finally I'll just get all edges square and clean on the planer with the milling complete I'm going to cut all the pieces to the exact link on the top side and that's it the legs and rails are all complete and I'm very happy as you can see okay nothing left to do but to go back to these big heavy pieces in order to cut the ends off I'm going to clamp them together as if they're one piece make a straight line put a straight edge on there and then cut it on both sides with my circular saw I might as well take a little bit of time to mark and cut the ends because everything that I don't cut with the circular saw I'm going to have to cut out with my handsaw and that's it no specialty tool here I could probably use a reciprocating saw something like a sawzall but I think that'd be too violent I think I get a cleaner cut with just this handsaw you can see the cut clearly isn't perfect but that's not really a problem we're going to spend a few minutes with the belt sander I'm going to sand it down and then I'm going to move to my random orbit sander with the belt sander I'm actually going to start very aggressively I'm going to start with a 36 grit this might seem like it's too much but it's really not we're dealing with endgrain these are some fairly high density boards even though it's a softwood it still took me a little bit of time with thirty-six tricks to get this down to flat after the belt sander took it down to why I felt like it was completely flat and smooth I switched to my random orbit sander and I put on 60 grit paper here and even this took quite a while I wanted to make sure I took out all of the scratches from the belt sander and get it even through there still after that I moved up to a hundred and stop I didn't want to go any finer than that at this point you can see that the end grain of these boards has a lot of text in it I was actually going to cut another few inches off of the end and I probably would have eliminated the text but I decided to go ahead and go with a slightly longer bench instead and so I vacuumed out the sawdust and I'm actually going to fill it with this wood putty that I'm making I simply collected a bunch of sawdust Douglas fir sawdust this exact species from my sander and I did that with every job really I keep sawdust on a side in case I have to make some putty I mix it with glue until I get just the right consistency I have found that this actually works much better than store-bought putty since my binding agent is actual high quality wood glue I can force it deep into the cracks or check marks and not only does it end up looking very much like the wood but I think the glue helps hold the checks or cracks together and they never get any worse it is important to note for a project like this especially that this is only a cosmetic problem having cracks or checked at the of a giant ez workbench like this is not in any way a structural problem once I let that dry fully I went ahead be sanded it off with the same 80 grit paper that I was using before after that I moved to a hundred grit and got the entire surface thoroughly I'm just going to quickly wipe on a little bit of mineral spirits which will sort of be like a mock finish so I can see if I have any deep scratches that I might have missed from the belt sander or from the rougher grits if I had found any deep scratches I could have moved back to a coarser grit and then worked my way back finer again to get them removed it turns out I was lucky this time and everything turned out well and the two halves of my split-top roubo workbench are now actually done at this point I'm going to shift gears and I'm going to do a comprehensive layout for all of the mortise and tenon joints that will go into the legs and the rails for the whole structure underneath the top I am drawing a lot of lines and rather than me try to explain each one and maybe it's sounding confusing I'll kind of let the video play out and I think it will become obvious what they're all for in case you didn't notice there is the photo bomber now it is handy to keep these things clamped up here for example I have all four legs clamped together as a single unit so I can transfer these lines all the way across at once another important thing to keep track of is not losing what leg is wet so I have a little temporary layout that I have drawn on my assembly table identifying legs one two three and four I'm also going to mark it on the bottoms of the legs as well and this will kind of help me remember what Tenon's go where and in the future you'll kind of see how that plays out as well I'm also taking care to note each leg which side of the leg is the front which side of the leg is the side or which might be the left which might be the right things like that this will all help in my orientation or layout later and finally I like to stand them up in three-dimensional space there and just make a quick check and make sure that they match up with a sketch the 3d sketch that I put on my assembly table then I'll go back to the leg each leg and I'll identify that portion of the leg here you can see the long rail attaches into there I'll identify the section of the leg where the short rail attaches also and now you might be able to see what is happening here I am laying out the mortise for this leg the mortise that is the very center portion and the area all the way around the mortise is where the shoulders of the tenon are going to touch I typically put X's in the mortise because that's the material that has to be removed and the area where I'm writing short rail doesn't even have to be sanded off because that's going to be underneath the shoulders of the tenon and then she is again I swear we we only catch about 5% of what she does when were actually filming we find them all later when I'm going through and reviewing the video okay with everything laid out on the legs I like to put them back up again in three dimensions and make sure that the long rail faces long real short rail phases short rail and everything meshes up in 3d space it's pretty disheartening with the time that it takes to build the leg to accidentally put a mortise in the wrong place and here's our group of legs and that mortise was in fact in the right place we just started before I decided to stop and catch that shot and here are all of the rails the for short rails and the two long rails there are many ways to remove the material from the mortise one way is using a router one way is that can simply be chiseled out another way which if you have a drill press or even just a drill and you can kind of hog out a lot of the material first with the drill and that makes chiseling the edges square a lot easier and faster once the material is removed I like to start chiseling by going lightly once around the perimeter to kind of identify the edge I have seen many ways of doing this and I'm sure that most people's ways are better than mine I am mostly a power tool user I have been woodworking for almost thirty two years now but I used almost exclusively power tools I decided to do this workbench entirely with hand-cut mortise and Tenon's and I've probably only done a dozen or so of these in my life so I'm not an expert but chiseling soft wood is actually pretty easy so I thought I would go ahead and do these this way to show everybody how it's done in the event that you don't have a router I just realized I said hand-cut mortise and Tenon's I suppose I lied about that I meant to say hand-cut mortises I will cut the Tenon's on my table saw I think a crosscut sled is a must-have accessory for a table saw this is a crosscut sled with a wide groove in it so I'm going to call up my crosscut dado sled I did make the tendon ting really easy for myself here what I did is I made my legs exactly four inches by five inches and I made sure that my mortise was just one inch smaller on all sides than the outside of the leg therefore I had to raise my blade up by one inch and I just left it at that height and cut all the way around it [Music] a method like this makes our very fast very clean and very easy tenon after cutting the Tenon's on two rails I did a quick dry set just to make sure it worked out so here a common problem that someone might run into is if you have rails that are at the same height then they're going to come in to each other they're going to cut into each other at some point and so what I've done is I've taken the short rails and I put a little notch in them so the long rails will fit inside of them when they go inside of the leg and again this is highly detailed in my plans that wraps up the rails and legs on all the mortises and Tenon's and the top I hope you come back to see the second video and how would this bench comes together thank you for watching [Music] [Music] you

Channel: King's Fine Woodworking

Views: 713,990

Rating: 4.8291678 out of 5

Keywords: Woodworking, wood, woodshop, woodworker, tools, grizzly, how to, DIY, make, maker, build, titebond, glue, table saw, sliding, compound, miter, mitre, saw, bandsaw, planer, jointer, drill, press, lathe, circular, jigsaw, DeWalt, router, sander, router table, woodpeckers, incra jig, miter 5000, sled, crosscut, disc, festool, Split, top, roubo, workbench, bench, woodworking bench, mortise, tenon, dado, bench vise, leg vise, tail vise, moxon vise, wagon vise, vise

Id: PcWoR2QhBDQ

Length: 21min 9sec (1269 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2017