2X6 Andre Roubo Workbench- Old-Timey Woodworking with Stumpy Nubs #4

every old-timey woodworker needs a good workbench can't just make your projects on the shop floor I mean what are the animals I suppose you could use a couple of Saul verses which may eat and poop less than regular horses but they lack many of the features that make a good workbench so useful and while it's pretty hard to make your own horse I'm fixing to show you how easy it can be to make your own high-quality feature-packed woodworking bench this time on the old timing workshop it seems like wherever I go these days everyone's talking about the roubo workbench uns this trend has taken the world by storm kind of like skinny jeans but really it's not a new concept in fact the roubo workbench design is about 300 years old Andre Ruffo was the old tiniest of old timey woodworkers back in the 1700s when everybody on this side of the pond was fighting over taxes on tea roubo was literally writing the book on woodworking his five-volume masterpiece was titled - the art of the jointer and I told you everything you wanted to know about the craft as long as you could read 18th century French don't worry about it it's full of pictures there's one picture in particular a meticulously detailed woodcut with a dramatic title plate 11 that has captured the minds of modern woodworkers looking to add some old-time unis to their workshops you have to get past the fact that Rubel seemed to be running some kind of sweat shop packed full of work benches and will look like little children are open lupus regardless the lower half of the plate illustrates a big beefy beauty a bench that looks like you could park a car on which was a good thing because I bet garages and robos they are pretty tiny but if you stare at the plate long enough you'll see it's not all about the heft of his workbench it was loaded with all sorts of features that modern old timey woodworkers have rediscovered and we are going to reimagine well first things first how do you make a workbench if you don't already have a workout I'm so glad you asked you could use a saw bench like the one built in our last episode or better yet you could use two saw benches or you could use a couple of saw versus the kitchen table or the roof of the wife's minivan anything that is reasonably sturdy and stable make the top of your bench first then you can attach your vices and use it to hold the work so you can do the joinery on the bottom half that's a good tip right there so what size should workbench be well may 18th century French is a little rusty but let's see what Rubbo had to say about it the workbench is the first and most necessary of all woodworking tools seems your bow agrees with me it's made up of a top four legs four rails and the bottom the top is made from a sturdy plank or table about five inches to six inches thick by 20 inches to 25 inches wide it's length varies 6 feet to 12 feet but the most common length is 9 feet well here's where I'm going to have to disagree with the old fella you see we don't all have giant French shops where we can sit and eat our flaky pastries on 12 foot work benches many of today's commercially made work benches are only 5 or 6 feet long because they're better suited to the garage side shop I'm making mine 5 feet long 22 inches wide and 34 inches high the length and the width are just the first numbers that popped into my head but the height is based upon some complex mathematical formulas a little bit of calculus geometry dash of physics and a pinch of good old what works best for me the idea is to be a comfortable height for planing over long periods of time some people say to just let your arm dangler side and measure the distance from the floor to your middle knuckle others say to measure from the floor to the crease in your wrist I say just go into your kitchen table pile some boards up on top and get out your favorite hand plate experiment with different heights of stack boards until you figure out what's most comfortable for you if I know anything of old timey woodworkers it's that they would have loved new stumpy nubs com this website has everything from new episodes of all the popular stumping up shows video tips tricks and reviews project plans and stumpy side-splitting blog sign up for the newsletter and don't miss the so now that we have our basic dimensions it's time to talk would the pseudo ruby had to say about this table I think it means bench is made out of elm or beechwood but most commonly from the ladder which is very stumped I'm sure Eleanor beechwood is very stuffed and I'd love to make my bench up but I'd also like to have a few bucks left over to make some projects on the bench when it's done I'm pretty sure that the old timey woodworker wouldn't have had any problem using some inexpensive alternatives southern yellow pine Douglas fir some of the other dense varieties that are found in home-improvement store can make a great woodworking bench they might not have had Home Depot in the old timey days but old timey woodworkers did know how to use the materials that they had on hand and I just happen to have on hand some very old dry construction lumber just begging to be turned into a workbench and Who am I to deny two-by-sixes destiny if you're going to be making your bench entirely with hand tools the 2x6 is your friend edge plane them down a little bit and you have nice five and a quarter inch wide stock without having to do a bunch of hand ripping but be wearing my old timey friend the two by six is often the naughtiest wettest stock in the box store so you can either pick through piles of boards and find some good ones then let them air dry in your shop for a few weeks or go with two by tens or two by twelves which are often much drier and have fewer large nuts you just have to rip them down to width I like to think that roubo would have killed to have a stack of two by sixes to make his bench on it remember this was the air on the guillotine there were couple people's heads off over cake if they would have known how much joinery they could save by using two by sixes Marie Antoinette would have been a foot shorter a lot sooner so we begin with the bench top according to Rubbo it must be pierced with many holes into which holdfast can be placed these holes must be pierced into the top of the bench perpendicularly clearly robos bench isn't just slept what well actually it is a slab of wood but it's got more holes in it than a plot in a Victor Hugo novel besides holdfast holes he goes on to describe a large mortise in the top for plane stops there's mortises for the legs there's going to be some dog holes in our Rubel would have needed an army of the Lupus to chop all those mortises but with some careful planning we can avoid all that work I've got 14 playing two by sixes cut to five feet long lay out our holes lubos holdfast holes zigzagged across the bench and I'm sure that worked out just great for him but I'm going to lay mine out in two long lines running parallel to the edge of the bench I found that unless you have really long cold fasts a five inch thick bench top is a little much you see the shaft has to protrude at least a couple of inches through the hole and beneath the bench if you're going to get a good grip so if you want to maximize how thick of an object you can fasten down on the top of your bench three inches is a pretty good thickness by running my holes in straight lines I can just rip two of my two by sixes down to three inches thick while keeping the rest of my bench nice and bulky boring these holes are no fun let me tell you a lot of old-timey woodworkers would have just bored a few holes and then later on when they were working if they decided they wanted another holdfast summer it just born on the pole but if I do that eventually my bench is just going to look like Swiss cheese and since this is a French design we'd have a whole international incident on our hands it's better to lay them all out nice and neat now and suck it up and spend six or seven hours just drilling rebo's bench didn't have bench dogs now that I think about it I don't remember seeing dogs of any kind in shop I don't know what he has against dogs but many old timey woodworking benches are loaded with them and for good reason they make great plain snaps and nothing stays put like a board pinch between a vise and a dog I like my bench dogs to be close to the front edge of the bench because that's the most comfortable place to do your planing in fact I'm putting a row of bench dog holes on the front and back edges of my bench so I can work from either side a lot of people use round bench dogs because it's a lot easier to put a round hole in a bench top than a square one and it's also pretty handy to be able to use your dog holes for your holdfasts but I prefer square dogs because they just seem to grip the edges of the board's better and since we're laminating our top together we don't have to chop mortises anyway we just cut out our dog holes before we glue our bench top plus square holes make your bench look more professional people who see it will think you actually know what you're doing one of the most unique features of Rubio's bench design is the way he attaches the lake's to the top he kind of uses a double mortise and tenon but the outer tenon is really more of a sliding dovetail we can only guess what his reasons were some people say that it was just easier than cutting a true double mortise and tenon joint evidently Robbo didn't want to have to chop two Tenon's for each leg of course if he was laminating his bench top together like we are you wouldn't have to chop mortises anywhere now I've been gluing some of these layers up as I work but when it comes time to tie all together I'm going to use some threaded rod for super strength I prepared for it by pre-drilling for holes into each layer before I put them together just make sure you drill your holes a little bit oversized it's murder trying to pound a threaded rod through 22 inches of even slightly misaligned holes now that we've got a bench top done it's time to start talking about vices I like D cup cakes and drink cold ones but my favorite kind of vices are the ones you use to hold your work pieces the benches in plate 11 actually didn't have vices his workers were forced to rely on holdfasts and bench hooks to secure their work and it's believed that they talked about roubo behind his back with nasty french swear words because of it evidently he got the point because if you look closely at the image on the wall in the background hangs a portable double screw which could be attached to the bench top for dovetail and in the lower illustration we see a tail dies which would have been attached directly to one of the legs on the bench I really like tail vices because you can really torque on these meetings and they give you a little more depth between the top of the bench and the screw for dovetailing some small ports is the true old time you woodworkers vise and you can still order them from some companies nowadays but I found this beautiful beauty at an antique Fair this past summer now I'm going to mount it on one side of my bench like a true old-timey woodworker the cast iron vices have been around for a long time too in fact over the past hundred and fifty years this has become the most popular with devices but choose carefully picking out a vice is like choosing a friend you spending a lot of time together and you're likely to give it regular beatings a good vice will last lifetime but a cheap one might steal your girlfriend and totally ruin your senior prom I picked this one I'm from Rockler because it's really heavy-duty like the old timey advices but also has a modern feature a quick release you ever had to crank or ten or twelve inch bytes clothes you'll appreciate a quick release let me tell you this will mount underneath one of the front edges of the bench top and I guarantee it will outlast four or five edges especially the landing robo's workbench it didn't have an advice in fact I'm not sure any ventures did in his day but it wasn't long before old timey woodworkers figured out how handy it is to have some sort of vise on the end of your bench there are different types of them out there from wagon vices to tail vices but those types create a no pounds own on the corner of your bench I want to be able to pound anywhere anytime I want no matter what my vise says so I went and picked up a matching tailpipes this one's high-quality two together they weigh like a thousand pounds which really helps add some more heft to my bench after you don't pinch yourself with that quick release when you're installing the vise now that we have our vise is mounted we can use them for cutting the joinery on the bottom half of our bed of course we dramatically reduce the amount of joinery that we have to do by layering our legs just like we did the top the double tenon on the top of the legs are no problem all we have to do is make our center layer shorter and we automatically have two Tenon's on the top then all we have to do is bevel the sides of the front tenant into that sliding dovetail shape most of the strength in these legs comes from the way they attach to the top so I have no problem skipping the chopping of the mortises and doing some layering just like we've done on the rest of the bench this is going to be placed dirty but I'm going to use another old-timey woodwork or technique and secure them with cut nails you can still buy cut nails from specialty suppliers in fact many hardware stores and home centers still sell them in a harden variety which are used for concrete these will work just fine for situations like but the most important thing to remember when you're using cut nails is if they're large you have to pre drill a pilot hole and make sure you orient them with the grain otherwise you're just going to be driving a big wedge into the end of your board and guess what's going to happen I don't know it's just something about building your own tools just feels right in our next episode we'll wrap up some of the details we'll build a tool cabinet for underneath and we'll talk about some of the features that a workbench like this has to offer how to get the most out until then sit back every self a cold one you've earned it my friend

Channel: Stumpy Nubs

Views: 312,313

Rating: 4.8096504 out of 5

Keywords: christopher schwarz, andre roubo, stumpy nubs, woodworking bench

Id: o7yF5av6MDM

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2013