My Split Top Roubo Woodworking Workbench - Ask Matt #5

hey everyone my name is net welcome to my shop and welcome to episode 5 of my ask Matt series we're answering Brower topic question suggested by you the viewer in this episode we've been talking about my workbench and I'm going to start out by talking about the rough measurements and the different vices and the workholding options and I'll get into how I built it so let's get started so it gets started the total length of the bench is 87 inches the width is almost 24 inches wide each individual slab or each of the slabs here are both 11 inches wide or close to that and the gap in the middle is about 1 and 7/8 around there the total thickness of the bench is 4 and 5/8 inches thick and then the total height is 33 inches high when I'm in my shop wearing my shoes I'm about 5 7 some a little bit on the shorter side now nice thing while building your own bench is you can make it to any dimension you want especially the height so you can customize the height of the bench to be exactly what you need for your actual height which is really nice I have my bench outfitted with the bench crafted hardware I have both the tail vise and a leg vise let me take you through each of those vices and show you what kind of work holding options they both provide so tail vise works primarily by using these little dogs in the tail vise and on the bench to pinch things between so if I wanted to plane this board for instance I could put it between dogs and my bench crank down on the tail vise it's a little bit there and this board is not going anywhere some that like actually plane on this or do whatever I want in this fashion that's pretty handy the other really handy thing here with the tail vise I don't do very often because I have the leg place is you can actually clamp things vertically in here as well so that might be handy if you need to work on the end grain here maybe some sawing or anything like that another option there okay the leg vise is really nice if you want to clamp something vertically like that or you want to clamp something maybe horizontally like this or even longer board like this to work on the edge a thing that I like about this device a lot is how smooth it is you can see I can just throw this board in here give it a spin maybe give another quarter turn and this board is completely locked in now it's just not going to go anywhere this thing has a lot of grip I have the version of the hardware kit that uses the criss cross which is this little X piece down in here that keeps the jaw and the bench parallel the whole motion of the travel the other version that has a pin block down here where you have to remove a pin and put in different places to keep those two things parallel again the chop in the side of the bench but the criss cross allows you just crank it out all the way without having to adjust it now I use this a lot when I'm sawing so if I'm doing I'm sawing DuckTales for instance I'll have a board clamp vertically in here or if I want to play in the edge of a board I have the option to do that here as well in the leg vise now down here I have a sliding Deadman and this is really handy if you want to clamp something really long in the leg vise you can put it in the vise and then I don't have any pins but you can put a pin into one of these holes and that allows you to support that workpiece through the much longer length I don't really do any kind of edge jointing on my bench so I don't use that very often but it's there if I need it that just slides back and forth on this cool little V track and on this end I have holes drilled first or my holdfast now down here on the base itself on the Shelf I have a whole bunch of bull blanks which adds a little more mass to the bench and it also gets them kind of off the floor and out of the way I don't really have anywhere else to put them and down here I keep my strap for sharpening my chisels and planes as well as the honing compound or the strapping compound and I also keep a brush for brushing off the bench whenever it gets dirty I have a few jigs down here as well by use pretty often and probably the most often thing I use is this piece of plywood this is my backer from doing any kind of chopping I put this down on the bench if I'm doing like a dovetail for a drawer and I chop right on here instead of chopping right onto the bench so it's a sacrificial backer for the bench use that all the time now the next thing I'm going to talk about is the gap between the two slabs a lot of people ask you know why why is it a good idea to have two slabs on a gap in between and really the answer is flexibility you have a lot more flexibility and the things you can do with your bench in the position is right now it's great as a tool holder so you can set your tools in there as you're working so they don't roll off the bench and they're real easy to grab and like this the gap isn't really doesn't really get in the way because it's recessed enough where it's not going to get in the way if like a board is here nothing's really going to like fall down in there either that's one position the next position is if I lift it out of here and slide it over a little bit now it's raised and that's really handy as a little planing stop so you take a board but it up against there and now you can plane this way which is handy as well now the most useful part of this is if you want to put a clamp in the middle of your bench so if I want to clamp a workpiece or something out here in the middle of the bench that's easy enough with the split top because you can just drop your clamp down there and clamp it right there so now you have a clamp in the middle of the bench and that's actually been really handy a few times I don't clamp through the middle of the bench that often but when I want to it's really handy to have that option available I used to just leave the gap stop in there and I just use it as a tool holder which is really nice because I tend to lose my tools off the edge of the bench all the time now one more workholding option I do have here is to use a holdfast and these are really really handy because they allow you to clamp something to your bench really quickly the holdfast just a piece of bar stock that's bent to a flat spot on it and it goes in a hole in your bench I only have one right now because I've only drilled one so far it's not sure where I want to put them all but it slides right in there and you hit it with a hammer or mallet and now your workpiece is locked in place I hit a little harder there we go now it's really locked in place and to release it is pretty easy to smack the back there you go so I use that a lot when I'm doing a chopping this is where I sit when I do all my dove tailing so I'll have my my board that I'm working on clamped to the bench with the whole set and then we'll be up here sitting here chopping so I use that a lot these things are really handy really really handy so now let's talk about how I built this thing that was quite the process the overall project took me about 60 to 80 hours I was keeping track in the beginning but I kind of fell off after a while but I'm guessing it was somewhere in that range it's definitely a big project and it definitely takes a lot of work but I think it's absolutely worth it because this is such an amazing bench and it allows me to do so much more than I used to be able to so like a lot of my projects the wood for this lumber was something that I was involved in milling myself now the tree that this is made out of was a silver maple tree which falls into the soft maple category and that log was 17 feet long and about two and a half feet in diameter so it was a pretty hefty log and the boards that I got for that were two inches thick and they were between 18 and 20 inches wide and 17 feet long so they were just giant giant boards I ended up cutting them in half just because I couldn't really dry a 17 foot long board cuz I had nowhere to put that so I cut them in half and then I dried them myself in my basement so it was time to build a bench I had ordered the bench crafted Hardware kit and I had to go dig out the boards from my stack of lumber and of course I had them on the bottom because you know that's where all the things you want saw it's on the bottom so I dug them out and I brought them out and I started cutting them up into strips which was a lot of work my wife helped me carry them out and start cutting them up it took a few hours just to get those things cut into strips this is just just talking with the top here just to make enough strips and lumber for the top so the hardest part while making the top is the front slab by far it's a lot going on here on the end cap it gets a tenon and then the front laminate piece gets a dovetail that goes into that end cap as well you also have this dog strip here that has all the dog holes in it this takes a lot of time I've probably put about eight hours into making square dogs whereas if you were to do round holes it'd probably take you about an hour these are really simple to make too they just have a little piece of wood on the end here that acts as a little spring so that when you put them into the slot they stay where they are kind of raised that so that's really nice so the other thing is going on with this front laminate is the actual tail vise and that thing has a pretty complicated installation or at least it seems complicated when you haven't done it before there's a lot going on there as well the there's rails underneath there lettings be recessed into the bottom of the bench and you need to create a channel for that mobile dog block to go back and forth in so there's a lot of work involved installing that tail advice but again once you've done it once that's the kind of unfortunate thing while making a bench like this is you don't really do it more than once so although I could do it pretty quickly the second time through I'll probably never have to do it again but anyway once I got the tail vise installed I can start working on the base so all my base pieces are three and a half inches thick that is the uprights and all the stretchers they're all three and a half inches thick I had a lot of extra stock I'll cut off some things but I just glued together to make all those pieces I figure that might as well just use them all make the bench a little heftier all the base pieces are all draw board together they have a peg in them and there's a little bit of glue but that peg is really all let's hold them all together and it's a really really strong structure down there the top of the uprights of the legs have a little tenon on them and they go up into a small mortise into the underside of the bench top there's four of them one on the front and back that tendon is I think maybe half an inch or 3/4 of an inch long so it's not very long it's really just there to add some strength for pressure coming this way across the bench that was size the tenon there are two lag bolts that go up through the top rail the base into the underside of the top itself and that just helps keep it all down to the to the base so I don't have the tenon glued so if I want to take this apart I can the whole base is lude together there is a way to make it so let the whole base comes apart as well but it's really not that big of a thing it's probably I think it's only like four and a half feet long anyway so it's not that big of a thing if you wanted to take it apart to move it so I didn't feel it was necessary to make it call apart once I got the base built I could work on the leg vise now the leg lights itself is a lot simpler to installed in the tail vise but it's still a lot of work the the biggest thing here is that the crisscross hardware that I'm using has a channel that needs to be routed in the chop and the the leg as well so that needs to be all removed and cleaned out and then that crisscross needs to be installed the other thing I did with the chop is I used wood that I had milled myself from a tree that I had salvaged here in Minneapolis and I had these short like two-foot long pieces of 12 quarter that I milled up and had no project in mind form and they've been sitting around for a few years so I figured this would be a good project for that so I is part of that log for the the the endcap and i used the other part for the chop now i originally thought the stock for the chop was gonna be long enough but with the criss-cross you need a chop that goes all the way down to the floor so the stock I had for this was maybe six inches too short so I was thinking about using a different piece of wood for the chop but instead of doing that I just lengthened it with a sliding dovetail and I use an off cut from the bench top that had a cool like bark thing going on because I thought that'd look pretty cool so the chop is walnut and the bottom part is maple and they're connected with a sliding dovetail that is pegged and I thought that turned out really nicely and with the chop you can really do any kind of ornamentation or detail work you want in it I just added a simple taper to both sides because I thought that looked pretty good so after all that time to invested in this you'd probably want to baby this thing I don't it's a work bench it's here for me to work on and get things done on if it gets dinged up against dinged up as part of the whole you know workbench life so I don't really I'm not gentle with it at all and it's holding up really really well so if you're on the fence about maybe a soft maple or softer species being too soft for a bench I think this is a good real life example of how durable it really is so this style of bench is called a split-top roubo and a lot of people ask me where I got the plans for it to build it there are some really really detailed plans on the bench crafted website they're the company that makes themselves these hardware kits they have a really long document that goes through the whole bench building process including the installation of their hardware now I went a different route I am a member of the Wood Whisperer guild and one of the guild builds a few years ago was building this bench so mark does a really great job of kind of exactly walking you through the whole process step by step how to build this bench in video and he also has plans available too with that video that's the way that I went it was a lot easier to watch those videos because he's really good at explaining everything and I save me a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what was supposed to happen I'll leave a link to the Wood Whisperer guild in the description that link is an affiliate link so if you go over there and you buy the plans for this bench or any of the other projects they'll be helping the channel out so I greatly appreciate that I'll also leave a link to the benchcrafted website so you can stay click the hardware I will warn you though it is very pricey but I think if you see it in person you can kind of understand why they ask the price that they do it's really well built and it's very very high quality as always to give any more questions about the bench or anything else here in my shop please feel free to leave me a comment I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have if you have any more ideas for any upcoming ask mats please leave those as well and as always until next time happy woodworking

Channel: Matthew Cremona

Views: 251,584

Rating: 4.953846 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, woodshop, furniture making, split top roubo, ask matt, matt cremona, matthew cremona, benchcrafted, vices, Workbench, woodworking workbench, work holding, soft maple, maple workbench, woodworker's workbench, André Jacob Roubo (Person), Wood, split-top roubo, tail vise, leg vises, leg vise, hold fast, sliding deadman, the wood whisperer

Id: YmKSpXrPZrk

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 14 2015