Flattening the $30 workbench with one cheap plane.

hey welcome to woodwork for humans in our last couple of videos we've been talking about the $30.00 workbench and you really can build it for 30 dollars and it's strong and it's sturdy and it is very not flat and it needs to be flat or at least flat ish I mean it doesn't have to be perfect I think people get way too bent out of shape about this they think it needs to be labeled really exact and it doesn't it just needs up literally using the laminated construction for our bench top made it cheap and very sturdy but pretty much no matter how you do it it's probably gonna come out fairly lumpy on top and we're gonna need to do something about that it doesn't need to be perfect but it doesn't need to be pretty flat before you do any flattening you need to assess your bench and see where the problems are and you might think oh I need a bunch of straight edges and rulers and I need a ruler like at least as long as the bench and you don't really need any of that stuff you can get a surprising amount done with just your eyeballs so it's really easy to sight across the bench and to sight along it but when I look down this bench is very obvious that it's high on either side low in the middle and probably a little bit twisted and we can fix that stuff no problem in addition to your bare eyeballs you might want a couple of things to make assessing the bench a little bit more easy or precise for instance fine woodworkers often use these things called winding sticks they're just a pair of flat straight parallel hunks of hard wood that you could put at either end of a board and they exaggerate defects like bow and twist the set I'm using here I made myself out of SAP a lay but you don't need anything that fancy for this project you've got a pile of off cuts from making the bench in the first place go over to that pile and hunt around until you find two straight and square pieces of to buy hold them up to the light with the edges together and make sure no light is shining through flip them around every which way and double-check that you've got no light gaps no matter how they're faced them you might need to do a tiny bit of planing but I bet you can find two that'll get the job done straight out of the pile I did to use your winding sticks set them up so they're centered on the bench all the way and either end and then this parts a little tough to show on camera because it's hard to get both sticks in focus at once but what you want to do is sight over the top of your sticks and slowly move your head down until the tops of the sticks line up with one another when you're looking for is for the far stick to disappear evenly over the horizon of this stick as you dip your head down if the whole thing disappears at the same time that means your bench is totally flat this bench is very much not flat so when I dip my head down and look over the tops of my sticks the far end of that stick and the near end of this stick right here are both obviously higher that corner disappears last and that means my bench is twisted it's high on this corner and high on that corner and that's super obvious when I just look at the bench there's a big hump in the boards right here so these winding sticks just confirm what I can already see with my bare eyes if the defects were a little bit more subtle the sticks would exaggerate those defects and make them easier to see so now that I know where all the problems are on this bench I can get straight to work flattening it I've got my number 404 that I converted into a scrub plane in our last video and I'm just gonna use that to take down the super high spots I'm not gonna go over the whole bench I'm just gonna do the things that I already know a problem areas and what I'm doing here is going across the high spots with the scrub plane this is called traversing the board going across its sideways or at a diagonal because of the heavy camber on my scrub plane iron I'm not gonna get nearly as much tear out as you would expect even though I'm going across the grain I know that the middle of my bench is the low spot and I'm trying to bring the edges down to the middle so what I do is keep the heel of my plane towards the center of the bench and that keeps it registered on the goal that I'm going towards then as I continue to plane and bring things down when the plane starts to bite into the middle of the bench I know I've taken off all the material that I need to and I can stop now when I first glued this bench up I was mostly concerned with getting the straightest of glue joint possible so I didn't pay a ton of attention to things like grain direction as a result when you're planing you might get some bad tear out in some sections you're probably going to have at least one or two boards that are heading in total opposite direction from the other ports when this happens flip your plane around and pull it towards you instead of pushing that'll probably solve a lot of the tear-out issues as you're working you can use the side of your plane as a short straight edge put it on the part of the board that's low enough and lay it down across the high spot that you're working on and you'll be able to tell if you brought that high spot down enough you can also grab any random scrap of wood with a straight edge like one of your off cuts and lay that across to see if you've got a nice flat and I'm gonna do the whole thing in stages so once I've got the first 12 or so inches of the bench flattened I'm gonna move back check where I am with a straight edge and flatten another 12 inches or so and progressing that way I'm gonna get the whole bench roughly flattened out now I've got the entire bench scrubbed planed and just taking off the really bad high spots has left me with a surprisingly flat bench it's pretty good the way it is but I want to dial it in even more and the surface has a fair bit of tear-out I'd like to take care of as much of that as I can so I've taken my 404 plane taking out the scrub blade and put back in the original iron that came with it and it's set up to take sort of a medium cut now instead of just working on the high spots of the bench I want to work over the entire surface of the bench I'm gonna start by going from one end of the bench to the other at a 45 degree angle covering the entire bench from side to side and going from one end all the way to the other that's going to give me a relatively flat and clean surface but especially because I'm using a short plane like this there could be errors low spots high spots stuff like that so then I'm going to do the exact same thing in the opposite direction I'm going to go from the opposite side and the opposite end also at a 45 degree angle and going at it from two angles like that should cancel out any errors and leave me with a very clean final surface I want to make absolutely sure that I'm doing the whole bench so I'm gonna crosshatch the entire thing with a pencil and with most traditional wood work I would stand next to the work while I planed it but I'm still gonna have to sit on the bench so this part of the process almost requires me to pull the plan it's really not a big deal these metal planes pull just fine now that I've smooth planed the bench in both directions actually really flat and the surface is good too there's still some localized spots of tear-out but this is a workbench I honestly don't care now I'm really glad I put the pencil marks all over the bench because I can still see those marks here and there and throughout most of the bench they're little localized areas that don't really mean anything and I don't care but when I get down to this end of the bench that I'm sitting on right now I have no pencil marks along either side and very clear pencil marks all through the middle of the bench and that tells me unambiguously that this bench is still high on either side and low in the middle now in a way that's good news because I plan on doing most of my planing over at the other side of the bench where I made that mortise for putting in the planing stop that's the part of the bench I really need to be flat this end of the bench is gonna be more about chopping mortises sawing Tenon's stock breakdown stuff like that it doesn't need to be perfectly flat I could leave it alone if I didn't have obsessive-compulsive problems I need to flatten this now just as a demonstration this is a great time to own a long plane like I'm gonna grab this old wooden jointer and I'm gonna shoot down both sides of the bench and long planes like this are really awesome because they skip over all the little low spots and valleys and just nip the tops off any of the high spots in the wood they're perfect for leveling large surfaces it's why they exist now I know you're thinking rx very nice you have that nice old jointer that just gets the job done for you well what about the rest of us schlubs out in the world trying to get some woodwork done what about us don't worry I'm on it I think there's a way to make a longish plane that's not gonna cost a ton of money give me a week or two but more importantly if you have to run this operation and just do it with your short little 404 it's not that big of a deal just go straight along the boards and take off material until they're even with that center section and go ahead and plane off those pencil marks - once I'm done and I'm really happy with the surface that I have I'm gonna go ahead and block sand the entire thing now you can do this by hand like I'm doing here or if you own a power sander go ahead and use it this is what working for humans not would working for masochists there's no reason we shouldn't plug something into the wall if we've got it once the entire bench is sanded I'm gonna make a finish out of one half spar urethane and one half mineral spirits and I'm gonna paint that over the whole bed I wouldn't even call this finishing I'm really just gonna slather it on one coat a day for three days giving the bench a lot of time to soak up that finish in between now right now a lot of people are wringing their hands and saying oh my god you don't put polyurethane on a workbench I know relax here's the thing this bench is made out of soft wood it's quite soft you can dent it with your fingernail and I expect this bench to live a hard life I'm gonna take it outside this summer hopefully get into some chair making and some green woodworking and this bench is gonna be outside it's gonna get moved around it is gonna get the snot kicked out of it it really needs all the help that it can get the thing about spar urethane is that it's a little bit waterproof and it's somewhat UV resistant now I'm watering it down with the mineral spirits because I wanted to soak in as much as possible that way it's gonna stiffen all the fibers of the wood and make the surface harder and tougher it shouldn't form a film on the wood because I've got it thinned out so much so it's not gonna be slippery and send my work pieces skittering all over the place and even if it did that I could just stand the surface a little bit and I'd get that grip back again so this is just some preventative maintenance to give this bench as long a life as it can possibly get this was a big enough project that I don't feel like doing it again any time soon before I go let me just say that I love making woodwork for humans videos people are responding to them really well and I know that because my numbers are way up way more people are watching these videos my subscriber count is way up I'm just doing great at the moment and I still want to do better so if you're enjoying these videos or just one thing you can do that would really help me out share them on social media especially places like Facebook and Reddit where I really don't have much of a presence if you're on those platforms slap one of those videos up there say a nice thing or two about them it's gonna make it so much easier for new people to find these videos and for this series to keep growing I'd honestly like to do more of these maybe even two videos a week if the videos are getting a good response and I'm making enough money I can make that happen and you can help with it it's the only thing I need oh and of course I always like to remind everybody that these videos are made possible but my patrons on patreon without their generous support I wouldn't be able to make any of these videos let alone more of them so thank you guys so much and for everybody who's watching thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 537,156

Rating: 4.9082127 out of 5

Keywords: work bench, workbench, flatten, flattening, plane, handplane, scrub plane, fore plane, leveling, top, surface, sanding, table, wood, woodwork, cheap, diy, shop, shop life, make, maker

Id: 2sei5_9JIms

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/tomrob1138]

That bench is handy as well. I built one when i didn't have a space besides the back porch! Cheap enough to just leave it out there

[u/angecorrado]

I considered it for my present ongoing workbench build. But opted for a more mobile and modular design.

[u/BeginnerWoodworkBot]

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