Hold ANYTHING on the $30 Bench.

so today we're finishing up the $30.00 workbench and for weeks now I've been promising you that this inexpensive construction lumber bench was going to be able to handle all of your possible work holding needs without a traditional cast-iron face vise even though every project I've ever done personally has involved a traditional bench and device I'm still going to teach you how to get everything done without one to make our modifications to the $30.00 bench we're just going to use the same tools we've been using in the wood work for human series except we're also going to need a couple of chisels and you might want some chisel buying advice so here it is go buy some chisels seriously that's it personally I really like these narak sizzles with the wood handles and these urban Marples chisels with the blue plastic handles they're both really solid chisel sets that can be purchased affordably from Amazon and I will link to them in the description but honestly I just don't think it makes that much difference people even say Harbor Freight chisels are pretty good so go down to your local hardware store or Home Center buy an inexpensive set of even carpenter grade chisels and you'll probably be pretty happy with them if you end up not liking them you can always upgrade later as for me I'm a little bit of a tool hoarder so this morning I just kind of reached into the oddball drawer and found three decent quality old beater chisels and these are gonna be the chisels that I use from now on in this series in order for this bench to be a really good work surface it's gonna have to hold work pieces and all sorts of orientations so that we can work on the faces the edges and the ends of boards and have them stay stable the bench is also gonna have to provide a stable surface for sawing it's gonna have to allow us to hold boards down to mortise them chisel and rasp details and hold small parts that is a tall order that's a lot of stuff but they say if you've got a really big project you always want to do the simplest thing first so how's this for simple now that we've cut this notch on the underside of the bench we've actually created a vise seriously here's how it works let's say I wanted to work on the end of this board maybe cut in a tenon or another piece of joinery all I need to do to use it in this notch is to take a piece of 2x4 like an off cut from this bench and plane in a shallow angle along one edge two or three degrees is great now I've got a wedge I can put my work piece and the wedge together in the notch and then pound the wedge in with my mouth it holds really strongly and it's easy for me to saw or chisel on the end of this board now that's all well and good for small stock like this but what if I have to work on a larger board like this one for instance the edge of this board is extremely ragged somebody was practicing with his new hardpoint disposable saw and didn't do a very good job how are we gonna plane this edge to clean it up well we can still hold this in this notch even though the board is so much wider than the notch itself it's this board is a lot thinner than the one I was just working on so I'll add a little spacer to my wedge and then pound them both in with the mallet now this piece is held just as securely as the smaller pieces and I can plane along the top edge now I'm gonna plane from the outside of the bench towards the inside because that's gonna help it to butt up against the inside of this notch and not get knocked out I also might put my leg up on the bench to add a little bit of extra weight but with these couple of adjustments I can plane the end of this board with complete confidence and it stays in just as tightly as it would on a traditional cast-iron vise now that I can work effectively on the ends of boards I also want to work on the faces and for that I'm going to use a simple system of holes and pegs in the end of my bench I'll start by using my disposable saw as a square to draw a perpendicular line a couple inches from the end of the bench then I'm gonna drill three 3/4 inch holes about four inches apart from one another I'm gonna keep the holes in the middle of two by fours so they're not splitting a glue joint you might have to shift them around a little bit to accommodate whatever lumber you on your bench it's pretty important that these holes be plumb and straight up and down and that can be a little bit tricky with a bit brace on some other projects I've used a square next to the auger bit to make sure that it stays straight up and down but in the woodworking for human series we haven't built or bought a square yet but luckily you're Stanley 404 is actually pretty square and you can use it to keep your bit up and down just go ahead and get your auger started and then move the 404 in on its side you can tell visually whether the bit is up or down and if the bottom of your soul is nice and shiny like mine is you can use the reflection of the bit to further refine it and make sure it's really perfectly plumb using this technique I drill three holes across the end of my bench and they all came out nicely to make the pegs I just got a piece of hardwood dowel down at the home center this is four feet long and it cost me less than three dollars I'm gonna stick this into one of the holes that I've just drilled and push it down below the bottom edge of the bench until it sticks out about an inch I'm just using a piece of scrap here and going by touch to make sure I've got the right projection once I've got enough dowels sticking out I'll flush cut the top knock it out from underneath saw it down from the top and in from the bottom and that's gonna give me a nice notch I'll repeat that with my other two pegs now I've got a flexible board holding system that will let me work on a board the long way and keep it nicely restrained and if I want to work across the board like if I'm scrub planing rough stock it's easy to just flip it 90 degrees and push it back up against the stops again with these three pegs is really simple to work on the faces of boards in either direction and when I don't want them anymore I could just take my mallet knock them down below the surface and they won't stick up and get in the way of other operations so now I can play in the faces of boards in either direction and get a good result so there's only one more surface I need to worry about I need to be able to work on board edges now when I'm working on a narrow board I can just use a simple planing stop and the board will stay in place nicely was just the weight of the plane or the other tools on top of it but if I'm working on a wide board like this planing stop is not going to get the job done anytime you're working on one edge of a board the board is going to be balanced on the other edge and it's just gonna be much too wobbly to get a good result we're gonna need a good work holding device specifically for putting Y boards up on edge so to work on the edges of wide boards we're gonna build the palm this is an ancient workholding device it probably originated in China and it's been modified to have this post on it that fits into the squared mortise on our bench now the palm and most of the rest of the stuff I'm talking about in this video came from this book ingenious mechanics by Chris Schwartz and it is an excellent book chock full of ideas about low Roman benches and workholding way more stuff than I can ever cover in YouTube videos and it's also just a fun and fascinating read I have no affiliation with Chris or his publisher and I get nothing if you buy the book but I still think you should buy it because it's fantastic and it's full of great stuff that you can use in his book Chris recommends making the palm out of half inch part wood but you might not have any half-inch hard wood laying around so I just used some half-inch plywood cheap stuff from the Home Center and it's working fine so far your palm needs to be about eight inches across the narrow side and on the long side it needs to be I don't know longer than eight inches ten inches it really doesn't make a huge difference you're just gonna want to cut a notch in the middle of one of the narrow sides and it's a pretty narrow angle less than 45 degrees and I left about two inches of meat on either side so I can butt boards up against this and it's not going to be fragile once you've made the top part of the palm you're also gonna want to make the post this is just a chunk of off cut I ripped it to rough size and then slowly planed it down until it was a snug friction fit in my mortise I'm gonna want to adjust the height of my palm with mallet taps so it needs to fit in semi tightly definitely not reduce Li so sneak up on that fit really slowly until you've got exactly what you're looking for chris recommends attaching the top to the post using a shallow mortise and some Roman nails but wouldn't you know it I am fresh out of Roman nails I must have used them up on my last project I guess so instead of doing that I recommend you go back from your notch about an inch and a half and drill a 3/4 inch hole then find the center of your post and lay out a three quarter inch circle and now we're just gonna make the same round tenon that we've used for all of our woodworking for projects so far so once you've got it lay it out chop it trim it glue it wedge it and flush cut and then you can add a screw on either corner of the post which will prevent twisting and just reinforce it a little bit more now you have a mobile planing stop that can hold narrow boards on edge even when they're very wide you can tap it up and down to accommodate whatever size you need and it'll handle narrow boards and wide ones so I really like the palm as a workholding device but it does have some limitations for one thing it works best on boards that are sort of within the span of your arms if the board edge is longer than you can reach it's going to be difficult to plane it effectively the palm also isn't great if you're doing something very wide like maybe a glued up panel you'd be planing like way up here and that's completely impractical so for doing longer and wider pieces what I really want is something that will hold the board's sort of along the side of the bench so I could kneel on it and then get a nice full planing stroke all the way along a long surface and luckily the exact fixture I need has existed for hundreds of years it's called a crochet it's French or if you don't like the French pronunciation you could call it a crotchet but it the crochet is a really simple shallow wouldn't hook that's attached to the side of the bench and it's holding capabilities are amazing I made mine out of three pieces of hard wood I glued them together and then got ready to do the layout which is the most important part of making a good crochet the wide end of your crochet needs to accommodate the biggest stock you have so I suggest leaving two inches or more over at this end the middle of the crochet is a very long gradual taper which allows boards of different thicknesses to be held really firmly then right at the end there's a very shallow curve and that allows even thin stock to be gripped effectively down here in the corner to layout this curve right here you can use any medium-sized round object that's laying around your workspace I used the base of my router it is seven inches across if you're curious I used that to draw in the curve and then I connected the top of the curve to the back of the crochet just using a stick as a straight edge remember to leave a few inches on this end here so you have a big stable mounting surface to connect the crochet to the bench the outside edge doesn't really do anything but it needs to look nice and you don't want any sharp corners or angles that you're gonna hurt yourself on when you're walking around the bench so use the same curve to layout this part on the outside and then just connect it to the outside point using your straightedge cutting your crochet out of a big block of hardwood is not easy but there are a lot of techniques you can use to make it simpler start by wedging your block into your bench and then cut off that outside line using your hardpoint saw I will admit this part did not go quickly for me and by the end I was really wishing for my bandsaw but I did it you can do it too playing off the rough saw marks that you've left and then secure the block to the bench using a planing stop and a clamp now we're gonna make that outside curve using a chisel and a mouth you can use the chisel in the bevel up position and take big bites at the beginning while you're just wasting away a lot of stock then as you get closer to the line you're gonna want to make one precise cut on either side of the board following that layout line very carefully when you have two lines to the correct depth on either end then all the waste sticking up in the middle is easy to take off and you're not going to go below your layout lines because you have those nice and guides on either edge once you've got the shape roughed out you can clean it up using your wide chisel and then your sanding block to get a smooth finish doing the inside of the crochet is basically the same thing solve a long line and then chisel out the curve except this time you're gonna flip the chisel over and use it bevel down the bevel down position really excels at doing inside curves because you can ride the bevel and very slightly adjust the angle of the chisel as you're tapping it to get a nice smooth curve you're getting rid of a lot of waste here so you can use it as a great opportunity to practice chiseling curves just to ride that bevel in making the curve over and over again as you approach your layout line and by the time you get down to it you'll be very good chiseling curves you can attach the crochet to the side of your bench using a couple of long lag screws and washers or if you don't have that hardware and you don't have a socket wrench you could just attach it using Peg's cut from our dowel stock and just blew those in with regular woodworking glue they'll work great too no matter how you install the crochet all the drilling and countersinking that you need to do can be done with the bracing bit and once you're done you get to see just how well the crochet holds the board I mean look that it's it seriously look at this I am never gonna get tired of doing this like magic with the board in the crochet you can hold it with your knee and that works very very well for short ish boards but for longer boards we're gonna need something to hold up that far end a little bit something like this for instance grab an offcut from the bench and drill staggered three-quarter inch holes about one inch apart when your holes are drilled you can screw a wedge to one side and then it's easy to pound it into the notch in your bench and add a peg to whatever hole is convenient once you have this setup complete you can hold boards of pretty much any length and any width very easily in your batch fixtures like this that are usually called deadman or bore Jack have existed for a really long time but I'm gonna take us to any bit of credit for myself I figured out all the ways to make it work with this bench this one thing this one's mine oh and you might be thinking I really want to make one of those but I don't have a bunch of 1 inch hardwood sitting around what can I make it out of well I think you can make it out of plywood in fact I'm totally sure you can make it out of plywood because I did it this is just three pieces of 3/4 inch plywood that I glued together and then cut out I blew this one out on the bandsaw because I just didn't have time to make two of these things by hand but I know you can work plywood really effectively with hand tools because I've done it a bunch of times obviously the better quality plywood you use the better result you're gonna get but you can pretty much use whatever sitting around if all you have to make this thing is plywood don't hesitate it'll work great so listen I am the first one to admit that the $30.00 bench looks a little peculiar or weird okay it's weird looking it is but also it works now I've been using a traditional bench and a metal screw operated vice for over a decade and I love them but one thing I've noticed about regular vices is that they work so well they make you a little bit lazy no matter what you're doing you can just clamp it in the vise tighten it down and go and you never really have to think very much about workholding when you get rid of that advice and move on to a more basic bench like the one we've just finished you get to do all of the exact same stuff planing sawing chiseling sanding faces edges ends it's all possible on this bench it's all effective but it does require a little bit more thinking and you know that's probably not a bad thing as craftspeople we probably should spend a little bit more time thinking about our work as we're doing it the other thing I love about this bench is that it doesn't have any fancy components and it's so cheap to build once you've made one you can make one again no problem if you move houses and you have to leave your old bench behind or if your bench just gets old and worn out you can always just grab a stack of two by fours a little bit of glue a few basic tools and bang out another one in a day or two it's just not a very big project and then you can use it to make all kinds of things it's really exciting now if you're watching this video and you're enjoying it it'll probably make a lot more sense to you if you watch the rest of the videos in the woodwork for humans series and there is a link to that playlist down in the description go watch all of those videos and you'll understand what tools were using and why and more of the techniques that maybe I kind of glossed over a little bit in this video now your gonna be watching this video on a Wednesday and on the day after this video airs I will be at Spring Mick at Lincoln Electric in Cleveland Ohio which is also where I live so if you are also gonna be at spring make by all means come over and say hi I would love to meet you unless I'm talking to somebody really important like jimmy dore ester or alex steel if i'm talking to someone like that leave me alone i'm just kidding come over and say hi no matter what i love meeting my viewers and before i go i have to thank my patrons on patreon these videos literally would not be possible without their support so if you're interested in supporting this content go over to patreon calm Rex Krueger and check out all the stuff I have from my patrons my patrons get all of these videos three or four days early they get exclusive blog posts tool reviews book reviews tool giveaways and a bunch of other stuff for instance I just did a bonus video with Tim Cunningham the urban forge about how to pick affordable hammers for the beginning blacksmith and that video is just for my patrons so maybe you want to see it it's not very difficult anyway thanks to everybody who watched this video the $30 bench has been an amazing experience and I can't wait to use it to make more awesome stuff using super minimum tools thanks a lot and I'll see you next week

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 358,752

Keywords: bench, workbench, hand tool, handtool, saw, plane, handplane, hand tool woodoworking, flattening, bench top, shop, shop life, basic, beginner, cheap, workholding, diy, construction lumber, 2x4, make, maker

Id: tdnmQ22lUow

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019