Build a REAL workbench for $30

hey welcome to woodwork for humans the series where we make a lot with very little like for instance so far we've made a rustic bench and a woodworking mallet with very few tools like almost no tools at all but there is one tool that I've been using that maybe is sort of been cheating my bench a bench like this is an enormous asset when you're doing woodworking mine has big thick Timbers for the legs and the heavy engineered wood top that I can bolt the vise to and speaking of vices a cast-iron quick-release vise like this one is one of the most useful and efficient things a woodworker can own but getting one is no joke new ones are typically either crappy or very expensive and even a vintage one like this one can be difficult to get and pricey I spent months hunting this vise down it was in very poor condition and needed an extensive restoration but even with all of that I still paid 50 bucks for it and actually getting my hands on it required a lengthy exchange over emails and then I drove over an hour and picked it up from the parking lot of a grocery store in Fresno California seriously I've been involved in drug deals that were less sketchy than buying this thing this is not my first batch I built this after I had already been woodworking for a few years my first bench was sort of a heavy work table it had a metal bottom and a hardwood top and I inherited it when a local business went under and that table and the progression from that to this demonstrates the central problem that cash-strapped woodworkers have where benches are concerned of course you want to build a bench like this but in order to build it you need a certain set of skills but to develop those skills you need some sort of bench to start with but if you want to build your bench you need basic skills it's like a Zen riddle [Applause] so for our inexpensive ultra basic woodworking we're gonna need an ultra basic bench luckily this bench exists and it's actually been around for thousands of years it's usually called a low Roman workbench and the Romans probably invented it but it's been all over the world since then Central and South America China Eastern Europe everywhere and the bench is still in use all over the world this bench is small and lightweight it's usually about knee height and it's six or seven feet long it has a ton of different workholding options and it doesn't require a vise although you can add one later and it's not that big of a project basically it's a bench that anyone can build pretty quickly and easily and get woodworking how did I learn about it well I read this book it's called ingenious mechanics by Chris Schwarz and it's a whole history and description of low Roman woodworking benches he traces them all the way through history shows a bunch of different paintings where they come up does all kinds of crazy historical research to figure out where they came from even went to Italy to look at some original examples and then he builds a bunch of the benches and gives very clear instructions on how to do it they're instructions that really anybody can follow so we're gonna build a bench out of this book but make a couple of tweaks to make it cheaper and friendlier to our super basic approach most of Chris's benches he builds out of big slabs of hardwood these are difficult to find and kind of pricey for the DIY woodworker so we're gonna make ours out of construction lumber instead also for attaching the legs into the body he uses either square angled mortises or cone-shaped mortises that require special tools and we're gonna simplify that too we're just going to use the basic round mortise and tenon that we used in our rustic bench built it's easy to cut and drill and then we can just tighten it with a hard wood wedge when we take the basic designs from this and combine it with a friendlier cheaper approach we're gonna have a fantastic bench that's going to allow us to build really almost anything the first thing we're gonna need to do is get some wood so we're gonna make this bench out of construction grade two by fours I recommend you get something relatively high quality so if you can get like southern yellow pine or Cypress those would be good choices needs to be kiln dried what I have here in northern Ohio is Douglas fir that's another good choice it's got a really good strength weight ratio one thing I recommend that you don't get is big-box stores to sell this stuff they call light wood which is some mystery conifer that they import from Asia and that stuff gives a whole new meaning to the term soft wood it is like mozzarella cheese and it's not really gonna do for a project like this spend a couple more bucks and buy whatever the premium construction lumber around you is and then when you're at the store take your time and pick out your pieces really carefully I have like nine two by fours here I genuinely went through 30 or 40 of them and I checked to make sure they were the straightest most defect-free boards I can find um it took a little while but nobody at Home Depot is gonna care so long as you stack your rejects back up afterwards I recommend you buy an odd number of two by fours my reasons for that will make more sense as we're building as far as the width goes if you get seven two by fours you'll end up with an 11 inch wide bench and believe it or not 11 inches is great for average or slightly smaller people if you get nine two by fours then you'll have about fourteen inches give or take and I'm a pretty big tall guy so I want my bench to be a little bit larger it's gonna be more comfortable for me and what I'm doing right now is I've just got my two by fours lined up and I'm just looking for places where there are bows or any problems that are going to keep my bench from wanting to glue together gracefully they're trying to move both wood out and just get neatest cleanest blue lines that I can possibly get and that is about good and I've got one two three four five six seven eight I've got nine which is perfect now I've got my two by fours set up in a way that's minimizing gaps and I've got a couple of clamps on them very very lightly during the glue up it's okay if the clamps are pulling some of the gaps together but if you're relying on the clamps to crush the two by fours together you're going to introduce twisting and bowing it's gonna make it very difficult for you to get a flat top so the clamps should only be applying very light pressure really nothing more than you can do with your hands anymore gaps that you have besides that you're gonna have to address before the glue up what I'm gonna do now is take the mallet that I made in a previous video and just make sure everything is flat and sitting as square on the table as it can be I pretty much like everything I see so I'm going to draw a big cabinetmakers triangle this is gonna allow me to come back and reassemble the board's in this shape and now I'm gonna start hunting for gaps between the boards and seeing where those gaps are from so looking at the top I had a little bit of a gap here and a little bit of a gap here and a big gap right here so it's all along this board here and since I have gaps here here and here that tells me this board is bowed towards me a little bit and I'm going to identify that bow by just striking a couple of lines around where I think it is and then drawing an arrow towards it that's gonna give me a clear indication of where I'm gonna need to plane this board that's gonna make it easier in the next step now I'll go along and identify any other bumps or humps that are keeping this thing from coming together easily and then we'll take them out so the good news is you don't need a bench to build a bench if you don't have a table or some place heavy to work it's no problem grab a couple of MIL crates or a couple of five-gallon buckets really anything you have and just set them about six feet apart and that'll give you a platform that you can work on if you don't have a table or a flat surface just find a flat piece of ground I'm working on the floor in my basement it's flat enough that's gonna get the job done throw your piece of material up on top of your milk crates and then to immobilize it you can do but the end up against something could be a fence post a tree I'm using the post from my stairwell and then for added security you can just sit on it and that will work really well and you want move along the board and just plain off all the stuff that you've noticed so I took a high spot off right here and there's a high spot up there I'm not gonna sit in the middle board because I'm heavy so I pull this milk crate a little bit closer that way my weight is not gonna bow the board and mess it up and I'm gonna go up here and plane it down then I'll take it out have a look at it and see if that edge looks straight and it does so I'm pretty happy with us oh and here's an interesting thing that happened while I was using this plane and taking the big cuts off the two by fours I noticed that I couldn't get that iron to stay in place when I tried to take a big heavy cut it always kept retracting back into the body I took a look at the plane and I figured out what the problem is there's not enough friction between the blade and those little contact points that are cast into the body you can go back and check out the video where I restored this it'll explain a lot more about that but I figured out another trick with this plane today which is that I just sanded all the paint off of those little contact points and then I just glued a little square of wood veneer in over that and so now instead of this slick painted metal that the blade just slides across there's wood in there which has a lot more friction and then that essentially makes the Frog a little bit thicker and it makes the mouth of the plane tighter I honestly can't believe I didn't think of this before because now the plane holds a much deeper setting the iron stays in place better and the mouth the smaller so it's gonna work better as a smoothing plane and we should have been in the original video but anyway if you're using this plane and you want to make that adjustment it's really easy it only takes a few minutes and then you can just plane all those high spots off here two by fours and be ready for the glue up my lumber was actually pretty good and I picked it carefully so I only had to do a little bit of planing to get things lined up and get a nice tight glue joint you might have to do a little bit or maybe even none at all and now I'm ready to glue the whole thing up the first thing I'm going to do is cross cut all my pieces to length these are eight foot two by fours and I only want seven feet about 80 85 inches so I'm gonna cut off all the parts that don't need for that I mean use this cheap Dewalt disposable saw I did a whole review on it and that video also came out this week so check that out it'll tell you all about what's good and bad about this saw and how to use it most efficiently I have 9 pieces of 2x4 here and that's a lot of pieces to clamp up all at once especially if you've never done a big glue up let this before so if this is your first time or even if it isn't I really recommend doing this in two stages it won't take you much longer and it'll give you an opportunity to adjust things if something goes wrong so I'm gonna take four of my two by fours and start with them I'm going to lay them down with the glue surfaces up spread a nice even layer of plain old Titebond yellow wood glue and I think fancy I'm going to assemble them using the triangle I drew before as my reference point to make sure they're in the correct order and orientation and then I'll clamp them up with medium pressure I'm also going to use the off cuts that I just made from cross-cutting as clamping cauls they spread out the force of the clamping and instead of having this tiny little contact point I'm gonna have a much bigger contact point along the joint and that's gonna keep the two by fours at the end from ending up in sort of a wavy shape it just evens things out really nicely now you can use pretty much any clamps you want for this I have these inexpensive bar clamps they're cheap and you can find them all over the place you can use anything even Harbor Freight aluminum clamps are totally fine one thing that's good about these is that they're deep so I can reach in to the midway point of the 2x4 and I can just put all of my clamps along the top make sure they're centered top to bottom and cinch them down tight you might have a different style of clamp like this one this is an excellent clamp but the jaws are very short by comparison they can't fit all the way yet that's no problem if you're using a clamp like this just put two or three of them on the top of your glue up then flip it over and put two more on the bottom of the glue up and alternate the top and bottom that way it's gonna even out the pressure and you're still gonna get a nice straight glue up no matter which clamps you use so I'm about halfway through my glue up I've got the smaller half of my bench top with four two by fours all set and curing over on the side of the shop this is the larger side it's got five two by fours in now the reason that I wanted on even number of boards in my benchtop is that I'm gonna run a lot of different work holding stuff right down the middle of the bench so it's really handy to have a full board in the middle instead of a glue line it's gonna make things easier and more stable to drill into or mortise into and this is the board it's going to be the middle of the bench and at some point on either end I'm gonna want a square mortise so that I can drop different workholding things into the bench really easily now I could cut that mortise after the whole bench is put together but that's kind of a pain especially in softwood and there's an easier way to do it while we're doing the glue up I've taken this piece it's gonna go in the middle and I've just cut right down here and then I'm gonna open that up a little bit and glue it up like this I'll use another 2x4 right here as a spacer to make sure I get the size exactly what I want and when I bring in the other half of the bench and glue it together I'm gonna have a really perfect square mortise right here and I'll be able to drop all sorts of stuff right into that hole really easily in just a few minutes this side of the bench will be glued up I'll give it a little time to cure and then I'll join the two halves together and let that cure overnight once you've got your top assembled you can start using it as a low bench right away just throw it on top of your milk crates and you have an excellent work surface for ripping and cross-cutting you can take a little scrap of wood and pound it into the mortise we left and use that as a planing stop and you can clamp a piece of wood to the side and use the hatchet to pair Tenon's and all these operations are pretty smooth and easy and the bench is a solid surface to work on of course this brings us to the question of legs and that's a little bit of a tricky one if you have some hardwood scraps laying around maybe some nice white oak I strongly suggest you use that me I'm gonna use some of the Doug Fir that came with my two by fours because I want to keep the cost of the bench under 30 bucks and because I'm not sure what my viewers have sitting around I know you're gonna have some of this because we just use it to construct the bench so this is what we're gonna go with I covered the process of making round wedged mortise and Tenon's in my three tool bench build that I did a couple weeks ago so you can check that video out to get all the details on how to cut and carve that joint but for this one since I'm a little bit concerned about strength I'm gonna try and give myself a couple of advantages the biggest thing I'm gonna do is drill a larger mortise and make wider Tenon's so that I have greater strength where the leg joins to the bench now my auger sets top out of one-inch but I have Spade bits that are an inch and a quarter and I'll take that extra quarter-inch I think it's gonna help instead of using a quarter to lay out my mortises I found a fender washer that's an inch and a quarter across I'm sure you have something like that or you could use a cheap compass anything that's an inch and a quarter will get the job done I'm also gonna do the minimum shaping to the legs and leave as much material as possible I'll just plane them until they're square and then knock off the corners so they're sort of roughly octagonal but make them as thick and heavy as I can with the stock that I've got on hand you're finished bench is gonna have legs that angle out in two directions that way the tops of the legs are going to be in towards the middle and the edges and ends of your bench will be clear for clamping or work holding the bottoms of your legs are gonna be nice and far out and give you a wide stable platform to work on there are a lot of names for these angles like rake and splash but they're not really important all you need to know is that the legs are angled in this direction 32 degrees and from the top of the leg to the bottom is kicked out 15 degrees we're gonna lay that stuff out right now it's not going to be difficult the first thing you're going to do is draw a baseline in from either end of the bench in his book chris recommends five and three-eighths inches as your baseline but if i did that my legs would be in roughly the same place as my mortise and that would make my bench top very weak so instead i just went in nine inches I took that measurement and then struck a perpendicular line all the way across the bench that's my baseline then I went in three and a half inches from either side of the bench and struck a point and those are the exact locations of my legs then I used an inexpensive protractor and I used it to strike a line 32 degrees off my baseline finally I reset the protractor for 15 degrees and I used that to set up a little bevel gauge angled my bevel gauge towards my 32 degree line and taped it down so it wouldn't move around if you don't have a bevel gauge you can just use a scrap of cardboard on a little block of wood like we did in our previous project with your two angles marked out you have all the guidelines you need to drill the holes and get a nice consistent angle drilling the holes for your legs is going to be a little bit time-consuming but it's not very difficult you can use the Spade bit in either abri-san bit or an electric drill and no matter which way you use it you're gonna have to start your hole straight up and down to get the bit cutting and then angle it to be in line with your two layout lines having the bench down low is actually very helpful if you're drilling the hole with a brace and bit because you can get a lot of body weight over the brace and really drive it into the hole if you're using an electric drill I recommend running the drill at full speed but feeding it into the wood very slowly you're drilling a big hole and it requires a lot of torque once you've laid out and board your leg holes double check your Tenon's with a piece of scrap to make sure they're actually going to fit in your mortises then take each leg and chop a shallow cone shape from the thick part of the leg down to the tenon you should have a smooth transition from where the leg is thickest down to where it's in there list that cone shape that you're cutting is going to help wedge the leg tighter and tighter into its mortise as weight is applied to the bench over time that way the legs will only get tighter as the bench is used not looser you're also going to need to slit your Tenon's with your fine saw cut the slits all the way down to the top of that cone shape and make sure that they run perpendicular to the long part of your bench not parallel that way when you drive the wedges in in a very little chance of splitting the top get the bench upside down on your milk crates put the legs in their mortises and drive them home with a mallet don't be afraid to hit them pretty hard you want them as well seated as they can be once your legs are installed flip the bench over put glue on the wedges and pound the wedges into the slits in the tenant's because I'm using very hard wood for the wedges and I've got a very soft wood for my legs I'm able to knock them all the way in the legs are compressed a lot and I have a very very strong joint once everything is dry you can trim off the waste with a flush cut saw once the glue on your legs is dry you're gonna need to level the bench and cut the legs to the correct length assuming the bench sits more or less level when you flip it over it'll be easy to dial the legs in by taking a regular pencil and planing it in half and then gluing it flat side down to a little block of wood put the bench on something flat like a tabletop or flat piece of floor and then trace around the bottoms of the legs with your pencil and wood jig cut the legs at the line that you've made and you should have a bench that's flat and level and doesn't Rock so here is the completed $30 workbench are you a little skeptical I don't blame you it's pretty weird-looking but it's also not done in the weeks ahead we're gonna plane and level the top of this bench and do a bunch of things to add more holding options to it and that's gonna make it function much more like a bench that you're already familiar with but I have to admit this bench kind of works great the way it is that simple stop that we put into our square mortise works great for planing chopping trimming and even doing some saw work this is also a fantastic saw bench as its you can rip and crosscut in a bunch of different positions and you're a rock-solid platform because it's low you have tons of leverage and cuts go by pretty quickly obviously this bench is small it's not super lightweight but you can probably move it around by yourself and you can specifically design your bench so that it is light enough for you to move you can carry it anywhere you want to you can work outside in my shop for instance I really don't have space for another bench I don't have anywhere to put this thing so when I'm not using it I'm just gonna tip it up against the wall and it's gonna be perfectly out of the way do not really take up any space the best thing about this bench is that you get to sit down while you're working while other benches rely on weight or have to be bolted to the ground or to the wall to work in this bench you are the weight and so with a minimum amount of materials and effort you make a bench that's solid and sturdy and it's gonna help you do a lot of good work as usual I've got a free tip sheet that explains all the details and you can grab that at Rex Krueger comm slash articles and there's a whole playlist of videos in the woodwork for humans series so check that out in the description before I go thanks so much to all of my patrons on patreon whose support makes all of these videos possible if you are interested in contributing to simple straightforward woodworking ideas go over to patreon comrades Gruber and consider throwing in a couple bucks I appreciate it more than I can say thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 485,207

Rating: 4.9050117 out of 5

Keywords: bench, work bench, workbench, low bench, roman banch, historical, hand tool, wood, woodworking, wood shop, diy, cheap, easy, micro shop, 2x4, workholding, shop, shoplife

Id: 7rOHuC_yuV4

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/covati]

Steve Ramsey’s wood working for mere mortals is also an awesome resource for new wood works on a budget.

He has no fancy tools and is really down to earth about how he makes things and his advice.

Here’s his basics playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2Y7G15DrVt5hGupHwu78-WZIcXpziUJ-

[u/GasFlow]

I recently stumbled on to his YT videos and subscribed. Great info, well presented and no annoying hipster attitude.

[u/TheUpright1]

That was great! Thanks for sharing. This guy is new to me and he’s good. Reminds me of a good looking Uncle Fester.