The incredible English Joiner's Bench

this all started with a picture I was just messing around on the internet I found this and I thought oh it's a sturdy old English workbench very nice it's a Nicholson but you know some of the details they don't quite right here's the Nicholson and it's pretty different the legs are flush with the aprons and it's got these little triangular cuts the stretchers are mortise into the legs the top is big and flat my bench on the other hand has some flimsy planking in the middle it's too shallow to be a tool well and there's this diagonal bit on the side you don't see that in the history books and there's no joinery these things are put together with fasteners for God's sake and I think we all know that is no way to build a bench and look if there had just been the one bench I would have forgotten about it but here's another and this one is even weirder the workman has about twelve inches in front of him and then the bench just dissolves into nothing and so what these are these are carpenters benches I know I know the workmen would make this on-site out of whatever materials were around use it for a few weeks during the project and then just leave it and that would make total sense except why are there so many of them there are dozens of these things on the internet which doesn't make any sense if these were disposable benches for on-site work only then they never would have survived and if these were cheap throwaway benches then why does so many of them have expensive cast-iron devices still attached to them those things have always been expensive and look at the tool marks that's not a week's worth of where it's decades worth at this point I am utterly obsessed with this bench and also totally confused I find this this picture comes from a book written in 1900 and the author calls it a joiners bench okay fine what's a jointer well it's a carpenter who could also make doors build stairs install sash windows do fine trim work oh and also build furniture and the author doesn't just tell us what to call this bench he also recommends that we make it and he's got an entire chapter detailing how we might do that I think I need to go get some wood so I actually found a couple of books from around 1900 and they all have variations on this bench and recommend it as a general carpentry and furniture making bench that you can bang together out of soft wood and fasteners all the books agree on trestle construction so we're gonna make two sub assemblies with legs stretchers and braces all fit together then those trestles will be the foundation for building everything else I've got my legs laid out on a flat part of the floor with the worst face turned inward this piece of 2 by 10 cooked pretty badly while it was drying but that doesn't matter for a part that's going to be buried inside the bench I'll just keep the cup against the legs where it won't rock once everything is squared up I lay down a bead of construction adhesive and run in my fasteners hold on construction adhesive I know this product is unfamiliar to most woodworkers and I know you're thinking oh is that stronger than wood glue no it's actually weaker which I know doesn't make a lot of sense here's the thing what glue is very strong but it's also very brittle when it gets stressed a lot it breaks construction adhesive is meant to set up and still retain a little bit of elasticity which means that when it's exposed to a lot of force or a quick shock it moves a little bit and then it comes back it doesn't snap it's also specifically designed for applications where you're joining soft wood together with fasteners pretty much exactly what we're doing here and of course if you'd rather use wood glue or just use fasteners it's your venture so far I've been using my impact driver to run my fasteners in but this is a hand tool built I'm using a drill and a driver for speed but you don't need a single electron to make this bench just for fun I ran a few fasteners with my bit brace and it was amazing this clip is actual speed and I didn't even pre-drill my post I'm just running the screws straight and they're going like butter it's effortless so go ahead and just use your basic woodwork for humans tools it'll hardly even slow you down to finish my trestles I need to add diagonal braces and I've got a piece of Douglas fir 2x4 clamped across my trestle at a 45 degree angle I'll use a pencil to trace the spots where it touches my legs and then I'll use those marks to cut some fast half lap joints this is the only joinery you need for this bench and they are dead simple to cut I'll rough cut my ends to the correct angle and then use my rail bud to saw down the shoulder line then I can clamp the board on its edge and rip the cheek cut this was my first one so I had to trim the shoulder a little bit with a chisel but the rest of the joints I was able to use straight off the saw this is another reason I'm using construction adhesive it's good at filling gaps where regular wood glue needs things to be tightly fitted these joints can be pretty rough and they'll still work out fine oh and here's a trick for assembly don't fight with wobbly trestles while you're adding the braces just put a screw clamp at the base of the leg and it'll stay upright I'll put a link to these clamps as well as my fasteners adhesive and everything else down in the description now my trestles are done and I can move on to the aprons which are gonna give the bench a lot of its stiffness here I'm testing this board for twists and it doesn't have any but it did cup pretty badly while it was drying I actually bought this wood two weeks ago and left it up on edge to dry the wood was dead flat when I brought it into the shop and it's annoying that it moved so much but it would have been a lot more annoying if I had built the bench and then the wood had moved especially with you to buy ten stock make sure it has time to dry and get acclimated to your shop oh and I had this stock cut to length at the big-box store when I bought it it's gonna save me a ton of time and they didn't even charge me for the cuts anyway the apron closest to the user is going to get used for a lot of work holding and it needs to be flat so I'll throw the board up on my low Roman bench clamp it down with my butt and scrub plane the center of the board until it's level with the edges it can be a challenging to build a bench if you don't already have a bench but I built this low Roman bench for 30 bucks and once you build it it's much easier to bootstrap yourself up to something bigger like this joiners bench if you feel like the bench in this video still might be a little much for you start with my thirty dollar bench it'll really build your confidence once you have at least one flat surface on your apron board throw it across your trestles sit on it and drill a big countersink for your bolts I'm not using the bit brace for fun here I actually find it much more effective for drilling big shallow holes using the slower and more sensitive tool makes me a lot less likely to drill too deep when the counter sinks are done use those holes to locate your bolt holes carry them through the apron to the leg and then bore through the leg now we can pound in our carriage bolts now you might not be familiar with the humble carriage bolt I don't typically use fasteners in my wood work either but these little things are made specifically for heavy-duty construction where you're using soft wood like building a porch or a deck they've got this little square part right on the shank there what that does is it allows the end of the bolt to grab the wood so that when you spin a nut on the other side this part doesn't spin and you can torque it down with a wrench and the whole thing goes together really conveniently you don't have to hold the other side with anything it grips the wood for you these are actually fantastic from big projects like the one we're doing now installing these is very simple you're gonna drill a hole that's the exact same size as the bolt you're using so these are 3/8 bolts and I'm using 3/8 holes that's gonna create a very tight fit and you're gonna have to hammer them in I'm hammering these in with a ball peen hammer which allows me to flip the hammer around and use the ball end to seat the heads down below those counter sinks it's very easy to put a nut and washer on the back end and tighten these things up with just a common box wrench or an adjustable style crescent wrench it doesn't matter what you use now another trick you might consider is you might want to install the top bolt on each assembly first then stand the bench up and square the legs I'm just using my big homie square here and that allows me to get everything really 90 degrees before I install the second bolt that can be an easy method of getting things really tight and don't put any construction adhesive on the legs that's gonna help the bench to come apart later which might be important now we can pull the bench up on its feet and it's held together pretty well but it's much too wobbly the next priority is locking things together and making the bench top stiff nobody's floor is perfect so grab a couple pieces of straight stock and use them as big winding sticks to check your bench assembly for twist mine is clearly low on one corner so I've made a wedge of oak and I'm tapping that in under one foot to even things out now I'm gonna draw a notch in the center of each apron saw down the sides and carefully remove my waist I've scrubbed a piece of 2 by 10 flat and I'll set it into my notches transfer the wormans and sawed them out just using my cheap disposable handsaw and again be careful with your waste removal I call this piece the key because it locks everything together I hit all the glue surfaces with construction adhesive and tap the piece in your aiming for a tight fit here although glue and fasteners will help a lot give the adhesive some time to dry cut it flush and add a fastener underneath the next thing is to keep the workbench from racking or flexing out of square while you're planing and sawing I'm using this piece of 2x4 here to show the kind of motion we're dealing with the bolts will do a good job of keeping the legs attached to the aprons but they won't fight lateral force so we'll prepare some braces made of 2x4 and just insert them between the trestles and the key again keep the adhesive off the legs and the bench will still come apart if you need to move it we also don't want the legs pivoting in the other direction so we'll add some blocks at the ends of the apron take your time making these components we allow no rough work around here now our bench has a structure that's really stiff it's gonna fight twisting and racking really effectively but there's another problem we're gonna make the top of our bench out of plain old 2 by 10 planking material and this looks pretty be on camera but it's actually thin compared to the material most people use for woodworking benches and when you have a thin softwood top there's an obvious problem watch material like this is very springy it's got a ton of Bounce when you hit it with a mallet and we're gonna be hitting our bench a lot because we're gonna be chopping mortises pounding nails doing stuff like that we need the bench top to absorb that force not bounce it back up at us that's really inefficient now luckily I've got a bunch of this 4x4 material left over from making my legs in fact I have the perfect amount to make a couple of ribs that are gonna go in between the trestles and the key they're gonna stiffen up that bench and make it absorb vibration much more effectively installing these is really just like installing the key I'm gonna cut some notches I'm gonna notch the ends of my four by fours and I'm gonna put them in with construction adhesive and a fastener now it's really ideal with these if you get a nice tight fit and you have to tap them in but if that doesn't work out squirt it in some extra construction adhesive and cross your fingers you will probably be fine the last problem is we want to make sure the ends of our legs the feet are really secured and they don't have a tendency to kick in or out as we're using the bench now a lot of these historical joiners benches have diagonal braces not just on the ends but also lengthwise and that helps to immobilize the legs we're gonna add that detail to our construction but make it even better than the historical examples the undercarriage that we've designed has the key and those parallel braces and they make a nice little corner we can take on long braces and sneak them right up inside that corner where they're braced against those parallel two by fours and the key that's gonna lock them in super tightly the other end of the brace is half-lapped on the opposite side and it's gonna lock in to the end of the leg these pieces go in with fasteners but no construction adhesive from easy disassembly the shoulders on the half lap joints will give a lot of stability even with no glue now the structure of my bench is complete and spend a few minutes cleaning all the top surfaces of the trestles ribs and key flush with the edges of the aprons the bench isn't even finished but you can already see how stiff the construction is it resists planing force from different directions and stays solidly in place when I've knocked down all the high spots it's a snap to install planks across the top of the bench as I was building I found the straightest and flattest boards and I set them aside for the top where flatness is most important my best board is gonna go right in front of the work area followed by my second-best board in the middle my last one is pretty badly twisted but I only need half of this board anyway and ripping it down the middle eliminates most of the twists I'm installing these boards with plain fasteners and no adhesive this will make the top easy to replace as it gets worn and damaged and I'll always be able to pull the planks off and have full access to the undercarriage of the bench to make changes or add accessories this construction style is incredibly flexible if you need to modify your bench in the future it's no problem I'm also countersinking the screw holes very deeply which will keep the heads of the screws away from my plane irons while I flatten the bench even picking my flattest boards this is still rough construction lumber and you should expect the top to need some flattening if you need a quick refresher on how to do this I have a whole video on flattening your bench with nothing but a scrub plan and once you've got the top all planed your basic bench is done listen what I found this design on the Internet I didn't know what to think of it I sure as hell didn't think I was gonna build it but now that I have built it it's pretty impressive honestly and I think this might be kind of an important historical design that's sort of gotten lost because it's just screwed together construction lumber but that means that it's also really easy to build it might be kind of the perfect bench for the beginning or intermediate woodworker who doesn't have a lot and doesn't have a lot of skills I built this whole bench everything you see here wood fasteners and adhesive about $100 and it was all big-box store stuff that pretty much anybody can get and it really wasn't very complicated to make I mean the worst thing you have to do is cut a half lap joint and let me tell you any monkey with a saw can cut a half lap joint it's not difficult this design is also very efficient here let me show you something okay so this wood here is everything that's left over from the build process one piece of plank and a couple little scraps and this project used two four by fours two two by tens and three two by fours so the materials bill is very small and it's an extremely efficient use of materials you're not gonna have a bunch of junk left sitting around and I think I'm gonna take almost all of this and incorporate it back into the bench as I continue to improve it and modify it but I already think I have a really good idea so this is the part of the video where I usually say hey I've got plans for sale and I do have plans they're basic but they're the exact same plans that I used to build this bench and instead of selling them I've got a better idea I'm gonna give them away for free because I would like you to build this bench with me let's make this a crowdsourced project and try to come up with the absolute best bench we possibly can I'm gonna do a whole series of videos about this bench adding different vices and fixtures and improving and modifying it while I'm doing that go to Rex Kruger comm slash store or click the link down in the description get your free set of plans build the bench and then when you do put it up on Instagram put it on YouTube tag it the joiners bench and tag me at Rex Krueger so I can see what you're doing and what improvements you've made I want to see how you've changed it and made it better and then a couple of weeks or a month down the line when I have the whole thing figured out and I've incorporated all the best suggestions then I'll have a set of plans and I'll keep them really affordable just like I always do I think this bench could be amazing I think it could be the perfect thing for beginning woodworkers who don't have a lot of skill and don't have a lot of money but I also think it could be a great community project so consider doing this along with me I think it could be a lot of fun I also do a lot of fun things with my patrons because they are the ones who make all of this stuff possible they made they Finch possible it took me a lot of time to build and film this and pay for the materials and my patrons made that happen so if you'd like to be a part of that go on over at patreon.com slash Rex Kruger and check out all the free rewards and early access that I have just for my patrons and look if you're just watching this video if you're just along for the ride that's totally fine with me thanks for being here thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 1,321,537

Rating: 4.884871 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, the english woodworker, joinery, hand tools, joinery bench, woodworking incredible, woodworking project, woodworking projects, diy, work bench, carpentry, wood joints, how to, do it yourself, woodwork, traditional woodworking

Id: zcq1LQq08lk

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020