I regret not building this sooner

I built a portable workbench with a ton of storage and features using a sheet of plywood well almost and thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this video so to get started I need to turn this thing into a bunch of smaller things and I really like these Gator grippers for carrying sheet Goods around it really makes it so much easier to do this project is going to be super quick and I think it can be accomplished in a weekend no problem lately I've been making a lot of involved Furniture projects with Hardwoods and old Barnwood and it's just so nice that I can take some time to crank out a simple shop project every now and then I like to start by breaking down my plywood into manageable chunks using a track saw or a circular saw and then cutting it on this sheet of pink foam insulation this is by far the most convenient thing I found for cutting plywood because you can cut it over and over again and it just lasts a really long time before you have to replace it and once the parts are small enough to safely handle I can turn this job over to my table saw to cut everything from rough to final Dimensions which which includes ripping off all the rough Factory edges you will however notice me foing around with a tape measure a bunch and that's because this was my first project designed in metric because the dog hole layout on top needed to be in millimeters to match an mft top I just kind of had to roll with millimeters through the entire project design another nice thing about this design is that so many of the parts end up being the same width so you can make a whole lot of the same size strips at once and not have to move your fence around now over to the saw to cut all of the smaller parts which is another tool with Imperial measurements on it so here I go checking and rechecking my metric measurements in between each cut yay metric all right now that I've got all my parts cut I'm going to focus on creating that perfect grid of dog holes on the top of the workbench and this going to be super critical not only for accurate layout and cutting but also for workholding and to get this job done I'm going to go with the ujk parf guide system now I haven't used this this system yet but I am super stoked to try it out to see how accurate and easy it is to use so the first thing I need to do is locate where my starting dog hole is going to be and I could just measure that out and punch it with a center punch once I have that the parf system comes with this story stick which is just a long steel ruler with a bunch of holes in it every 96 mm the story stick is going to get clamped down to the bench right over that starting position and then I need to use this special drill guide bushing and drill bit to make a whole in the first and last hole that I want to make in the row the story stick has 11 holes to match what an mft top would have but you don't have to do that many if you don't want to one thing I like about this system is it's very good at using precise guides and bushings to make sure that you're drilling exactly in the center of each one of these hole locations once you have those first two holes drilled you need to put these pins in there and that's going to hold the story stick in place so that I can remove the clamps and drill out the rest of the holes and next I need to dust off the cobwebs in my brain to remember the old 345 rule from geometry or in this case the 6810 rule which is how the parf system makes a perfect right angle placing the Second Story stick in the six and eighth holes is all it takes and now that I have that side done I need to repeat that whole process on the opposite side okay now I have this set of parallel holes on each end and the rest of this is cake I just need to move my ruler to each new set of holes and then drill out all the rows one at a time all right well that was really the hard part of this whole operation I've got my entire grid of holes precisely laid out now all I have to do is go back and widen those to 20 mm to drill the 20 mm holes I'm going to use the parf guide and a special forcer bit so this parf guide has these 3mm holes that line up perfectly with the grid that you've just drilled out on your work to top and that allows you to reuse those pins to set the position of the guide and the 20 mm drill bit that you're using here has a 3 mm centering pin on it and that's going to allow you to hit the holes that you created earlier to make sure that you're drilling precisely in the center of that whole location but after drilling a few of these holes I did notice that there was more debris in the bottom of the hole than I expected and so I flipped it over to investigate uh no bueno blowout city I really thought that drilling these out on the foam insulation was going to help prevent this problem but apparently I was wrong like a lot wrong so my last second hail pass here is going to be to throw some frog tape on the remaining holes and then Soldier on drilling out the rest of the holes to see if that helped and once I had enough of these 20 mm holes drilled I could switch over from the pins to using these locator dogs to secure the guide and then drill out the remaining holes so this whole process took me about 40 minutes from start to finish which which surprised me but the question is did that tape work well no no it did not so I brought my top over to this workstation so I could give it a real thorough sanding and try to work out as much of that blowout as possible but honestly there's something going to be so much lipstick I could put on that pig it's never going to look really nice on the underside but that's okay because the top looks absolutely Flawless every single perfectly clearly cut and exactly the way I would expect it to look so I'm super happy with the way that turned out now on the underside I'm sure that's my fault if I done some reading and research I'd probably understand the par system is really designed to work to make these mft tops out of MDF just like an actual mft and so I grabbed a scrap of MDF put a bunch of 20mm holes in it using that same bit and it turned out the way it's supposed to look so just keep that in mind if you're building one of these for yourself s and you're going to use the plywood the way that I did you're probably going to deal with some blowout on the underside if that's a problem for you and you want it to be super clean I would recommend making the top out of MDF to assemble this workbench I'm going to use pocket screws Domino's would have created a cleaner look but I wouldn't have been able to disassemble it if I needed to replace the top down the road to make the pockets I'm going to use my castle pocket hole cutter which is a step up from a standard pocket hole jig because this machine uses routers to cut the pockets instead of drill so the holes are a lot cleaner looking and have no debris inside them and since these pockets are going to be completely visible to me all the time I wanted them to look as nice as possible but whatever jig you have to get the job done is what you should use and even if you choose to use Domino the build plans will still work either way and if you follow me you know that if I'm building something I probably also created plans to go with it so you can build it too it's one of the ways that I like to create value for my viewers and a big way that you can help support what I do and Shopify helps me get those plans from my brain into your hands Shopify is an all-in-one Commerce platform that allows me to sell online and in person and it integrates with the major social media Platforms in less than a day I got my site up and running with a custom domain and set of templates that helped me create a killer looking website having a website with my own domain is a real GameChanger because I don't have to worry about being crammed onto an online market place with thousands of other creators trying to sell the same thing that I do and if you sell your work at craft shows try Shopify POS with a tab toay feature for iPhone which makes selling your product in person that much easier Shopify makes it easy to get started so go to shopify.com mwa Woodworks to get started with your free trial now and a big thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this video now let's get back to building that workbench so the first thing that I'm going to attach are the side aprons and this is done pretty easily by clamping the aprons to my assembly table yes that's right I need a bench to build a bench I made sure to precisely place the pocket holes in the same place on both sides of the bench that way I could establish a safe zone for my tracks saw to cut without risking hitting any screws and after the apron's attached the last thing I need to add to the frame is a set of blocking which I just made by gluing up three small pieces of ply I'm careful to line them up flush with one another and then just use a brad nail to hold them together until the glue dries the reason for these is it's how I'm going to create a pocket for the legs of this workbench to go into and also add some addition stiffness to the frame so after pre-drilling and counter syncing four holes using this Nifty counter sync drill bit I can attach the blocking directly to the frame from the outside and then one screw from the inside just for good measure so in my design I move the two end aprons Inward and that just allowed me to add the blocking and also create a little pocket on each end that I could add a drawer to these drawers are going to be super simple quick and dirty to make I'm just going to use pocket screws again to assemble them the front of the door is going to be a little bit wider than the rest and that's just going to cover up where the blocking is on the end of the workbench and for the drawer bottoms this is where I strayed away a bit from my original plan of trying to make this out of one sheet of plywood because I really think going with quarter inch ply on the bottoms makes a lot more sense so in the end I think this is a much better choice even if it means that I'm not using a single sheet of plywood to make this workbench and because these drawers are so small you can't really have drawer slides in there so what I ended up doing is making these little rub strips out of some hardwood scraps and that's going to eliminate any slop in the drawers fit and then to capture the drawer and keep it from falling out I used another little scrap of/ quarin ply to create these bottom covers that are going to go around the leg holes and screw into place and one last little feature to make sure that these drawers don't fall out when I'm transporting them I embedded some magnets into the back side of the drawer fronts and then put chus responding magnets in the blocking on the end of the workbench and then each drawer gets a little small lowprofile drawer pole that's going to get the job done and just not be in my way and what this bch needs next are some legs those are going to be made out of strips of ply laminated together I went ahead and glued up all the legs at one time just so I could use one set of clamps and this is kind of like making a cutting board out of plywood and I'm careful to make sure everything is flush and lined up before clamping it down once the legs are drying out of the clamps I just need to give them a quick rough sanding to get rid of any of the Schmutz from the glue up before I Mill everything to final thickness and yes I'm running my plywood through my planer this plywood is Baltic Birch ply and every one of those PES that you see is birch hardwood so really there's no difference between this and a cutting board if you think about it and I do have spiral Cutters on the planter so the Finish is nice and clean right out of the machine with just a very tiny bit of blowout on the end but that's okay because I made these legs extra long so that I could cut them down to final length at the miter saw you could use a table saw for this if you don't have a planer or if the plywood that you're using isn't solid wood throughout I also made sure to sand these legs smooth one more time just to make sure that all the corners are rounded over and everything slides in and out of the workbench nice and easy to store the legs I created this little pocket on the underside of the bench and then to hold all the legs in place I'm just going to use some snap straps and then to secure the legs while they're in use I'm going to slide the leg into the pocket that I created with that blocking and then from the outside I'm going to drill a small pilot hole through the apron and into the legs this will perfectly locate Where to drill a larger hole that's going to accommodate a threaded insert and once that hole is made I can go ahead and tighten the insert into place nice and snug and you just need to make sure that it's slightly below the surface of the leg so that it doesn't interfere with the operation of the legs as it goes into the workbench and then I could just drill out a larger hole on the outside of the apron slide my leg into place and then fasten the whole thing together using the star knob so the reason I went with detachable legs instead of say like fold out legs on hinges is that I think this is going to be a lot more stable and prevent wobbling and racking and it also is going to give me the option to use the bench on flat surfaces like the back of my truck or on the ground when it's just not practical or necessary to get the legs out all right one of the other requirements that I had for this workbench is that it have plenty of room for onboard storage and here are some of the things that I'd like to be able to include having these things immediately hand is going to help me get right to work with the tools I use the most I did a little Googling around and I found these foam blocks that are made for storing test tubes securely and they just happen to fit 20 mm bench dogs and this foam Cuts Like A Dream On My Band Saw so getting the perfect fit is going to be easy and with the perfect fit these are going to be nice and secure in this drawer and I can't believe that I lucked out in and found these things and so that got me thinking about the best way to utilize the space in these drawers and make sure that my tools aren't rattling around and that's when I thought about using lightweight Kaizen foam this foam can be cut to fit specific tools you just need to trace around the tools and then use a utility blade to cut that shape out and the layers can be peeled out one by one revealing a nice little pocket that's a perfect fit for the item all right with the drawers packed out nice and neat I also wanted to make good use of the space under the bench I purposely made the space between the two apron ends wide enough to fit a 1080 mm festal guide rail perfectly and to attach it I'm going to use the fast cap track racks which is something that I keep on my garage door for all my other tracks and I thought this would be a perfect use for those and that leaves me just enough space to add my bench dog fence system I can simply put the fence dogs into the dog hole grids on the bottom like this and then for a little extra security I install a couple more of those snap straps and to finish this whole thing off I'm just going to add a nice comfortable handle on the side for transport okay the last thing I need to do is test this thing for accuracy using my bench dogs fence and a couple of dogs to reference the track off of I'm going to make a cross cut across this plywood panel now to check the edge for square that looks pretty darn good to me man that looks tight and now I have a portable workbench that both Cuts accurately and cost me a little over a sheet of plywood to build and I think I'm going to be so grateful to have this thing next time I'm working outside the shop now if you want to see some other shop project videos I've got those line up for you right here and until next time have fun in the shop

Channel: MWA Woodworks

Views: 234,673

Keywords: mwa woodworks, mwawoodworks, portable workbench, portable workbench build, beginner workbench, how to build a workbench, woodworking projects, mobile woodworking, mobile woodworking bench, diy shop projects, how to, work bench, do it yourself, diy workbench, woodworking bench, easy to build workbench, portable bench, garage workbench, woodworking workbench, small workbench, mobile workbench, build a workbench, hand tool woodworking, small workshop

Id: ccKE_XS1bLk

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023