Mega Workbench - How to Make a Woodworking Bench

yeah I gotta move the bench first so those are all 18 foot two by six I got from a barn tear down last summer they've been in storage waiting for a project and finally I think I'm gonna use them for a very stout workbench so I'm gonna cut them in half into like eight or nine foot sections and then I'm gonna laminate them into a giant butcher block style workbench these used to be ceiling joists so you can tell they sagged over the years and we're gonna have to cut them on a table saw that straighten him out I use a little block of wood to space my straightedge and it makes it real easy to be consistent you can see you started almost nothing and then we cut to about 3/8 deep and then down to almost nothing again I ended up ripping both sides this gives you a better idea of what the cut looks like I ended up running the wood through my planer I don't have a jointer seem to work okay [Music] I wanted my bench to be about four feet off the back wall and centered in the shop so I took the time to locate the legs this sheet of plywood is the same size as the bench I used it to locate the feet I'm doing this because I want to shoot grade this floor has got a pitch to it and I need to cut the legs appropriately to make the top of the bench level so I'm just using a water level here and I'm marking a story pole and marking the locations of the legs respectively so this is all the legs that are cut up and I'm starting the Assembly of the a-frames there's one on each side it's really important to get these right these are gonna control the rest of the bench build so you wanted to be square and flush and strong I'm sure I chose good lumber for it the best of the best of the pile at least I'm just marking out the pre drills for the screws I'm using that top lock to mark the lower block this ends up being about the three layers thick for the legs because it's four and a half inch wide and it's inch and a half lumber so that ends up being a four and a half by four and a half leg so I also marked the locations of these screws one foot on center because I want them to be in a very specific location so if I ever drill through the table again I know where they are I carried that throughout the entire bench so I'm making sure there's no twist making sure everything's square you'll see here in a second I'm going to use them to the carpenter's square the three four five and I'm just checking to make sure that the legs are Square to the top this bench is going to have a shelf in it half way up so I need to cut a notch to let in the ledgers for the shelf so that's what I'm doing here I don't know if you caught that but there are some sparks I hit a screw there this design is strictly let form fit function I just wanted a strong stout heavy bench that wouldn't move and when you're dealing with reclaimed lumber it you're not really too concerned with looks anyway so there's the notch you can see that I'm gonna have Ledger's going both ways there and this is the the long one the 8-foot ledger I round over the edges of my work benches just because I don't like splinters and I wouldn't be able to get in there after its assembled so route it first here I am checking level to make sure everything's okay I also designed it to be level with the rest of my benches worked out great there's the other ledger getting put into the notches so I framed the like a little floor to foot centers and now I'm spacing out the upper portion to be the appropriate width because after I'm done laminating this I want it to end up exactly at the right width so this is the shelf stock I'm cutting notches for the legs now I didn't know this but it doesn't fit with those spreaders on the top I fought it for a while and I ended up having to take those upper spreaders loose to be able to get it in there ended up fitting well done I'm just fastening this down he doesn't take too many screws he's just gonna be sitting there so countersink I'm about to make a crazy glue mess so that's what the papers for Here I am marking centers on the pieces that are gonna be the bench top same deal I want all the screws in a very specific location so I know that I'm not going to hit him later when I drill through the top if I ever need to do any like bench dogs or any kind of clamping mechanism I won't hit the screws so what I'm doing here is I'm putting the angle iron up to keep the distance apart and also to be able to clamp to it to hold up the pieces as I glue it and those I move the wood pieces to the inside so I could literally set the piece to be glued down on them and then I can clamp you'll see here in a second I think the lamination process took maybe even four and a half hours maybe five crazy mess I ran into trouble here my glue-up was starting to curve and that a-frame was a little bent too so I needed to make up the difference so I came up with this little jig to basically cut this piece to match that curve that top piece I'd show us specifically for this I I felt that it would Bend the most consistently out of all the lumber I I'm checking here to see if the curve has the right progression I just ran it through the table saw so now I'm gonna clean up that edge I can't believe how well this worked I mean it matched that curve perfectly very very pleased with that solution I ended up having to use my right angle driver to get some of the screws in and then later on I realized if I just use a really long bit I could get in there just by driving past the little number in front of it still pretty pretty difficult to do when he gets that tight now we're getting down to the last couple so I'm gonna just drive ten inch lag bolts through and clamp the rest that way the only reason I'm doing this is I don't have clamps big enough to clamp this bench so this was my solution you see I'm using beeswax makes that bit drill easier here's the last to another trick I use is 100% silicone on lag bolts it is like magic I had to clamp it up you can see those clamps are at an angle I had him up on a block of wood that was screwed to the bench because they wouldn't go to the far end of it and while that was drying I hopped under there and scraped up the glue now this process was interesting night I I wasn't sure how I was gonna tackle flattening this but as I started sliding the levels around I realized that the aluminum was actually marking the high spots so I just used those levels literally to to scuff marks high spot marks in the table over and over again and I just iterated you do the planer first and you do the belt sander mark it again progress with the grits finally sanded I think I went down to maybe huh I don't know 150 grit so in the end I managed to build this bench for under $100 I purchased the met ight the screws and the glue and I got all the wood for free it ended up being about 850 pounds I used 44 two-by-sixes that were 8 feet long I used a gallon and a half of glue about 600 screws and it took about 40 hours to complete well worth it I have a list of tools and materials to build this bench in the description and if you want to see my newest videos please subscribe thank you

Channel: Make Build Modify

Views: 3,885,516

Rating: 4.804481 out of 5

Keywords: Workbench, woodworking, bench, laminated

Id: I822PC9kW7Y

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2017