CT's Most Excellent Workbench Adventure

[Belle City Woodworking]

Outstanding effort so far. Excellent Dovetails!!!

Keep up the good work,
John

[Crooked Tail]

OK, it's starting to look like a workbench.

Starting to glue all the top pieces together:



Here's the ugly bottom. Ugly ugly ugly. But you can see how it's constructed, with slats for the front apron / dog hole area and two in the back. Two 8/4 boards in the middle with a couple of battens and breadboard ends.

Stuck the last piece on, and gluing up the whole thing:


Here is the top all glued up. From the front side:


From the back:



These pictures make it look a lot better than it really is. You can't tell it, but the dovetails on the right side of the back are about the worst DTs I've ever cut. The ones on the left are about the best. And I don't know what happened with the two main boards, but I really didn't joint them well, so there is an obvious line between them. Same problem with a couple of the slats also. Anyway, there's a whole catalogue of things where I am not satisfied with how I did it. I guess it is good to learn these things on "shop furniture" before building stuff meant for the house.

Now I am also realizing some design problems, at least as far as construction is concerned. The way the left end cap is done, you have to put it on when you glue the last slat onto the back. Now you can't take it off. So I'm going to have to flatten the top with that piece on, which could be a pain.

I've been letting the lumber (green doug fir) for the base acclimate while I've been working on the top. So I don't have a base to set this thing on yet. Building the base will be the next step. Then I will finish installing the front vise and build and install the tail vise.

The front view really shows how much bigger this bench will be than what I'm currently working on. I don't know how heavy the top is, but I don't think I can move it off there by myself, without risking damage to it, me, or both.

I'm excited to finally have it starting to take shape. This has been a difficult project so far because of the size of lumber involved, which I've never dealt with before. But I think that once the top is done, most of the real grunt work is done. I'll chop a few gigantic mortises for the base, but then it's on to more detail stuff in building and mounting the tailvise.

I'm going to have a beer, read a bit, and go to bed, where visions of No 7s dance in my head.

[mstens]

You're right, the bulk of the grunt work is indeed done the top looks excellent!

[Bob Zajicek]

I think your top is coming along fine. I can see how your bread board ends are now and can understand better how you chose to fasten them. I don't know if you've thought about this yet, but a scraper plane would come in handy trying to smooth the end caps / bench top now that you've assembled all.

Building one of these monsters is a great learning experience and I think you have benefitted greatly from it already.

Next time, you'll build the base first, I'll bet.

Keep up the good work!

[msweig]

Looking good.

I know what you mean by the size of the lumber being huge. Really seems odd compared to most projects. When I made my bench cutting the motices in the base (1" wide) seemed really weird. So, of course, the first set of mortises I made that were more normal size resulted in me blasting through the back of it because I was hitting the chisel too hard

Good luck on the base.

mark

[CedarSlayer]

Looks good to me, I suspect the Legs are going to be the easy part.
When you make the drawers, that may get rough again!

Bob

[Crooked Tail]

CedarSlayer said:

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When you make the drawers, that may get rough again!

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Yeah, I suspect the same. I may have to take a break from it and do a few other projects before tackling the drawers. Man, purpleheart is so hard... it's difficult to work with. It makes the hard maple seem fine and easy in comparison.

At least the drawers / cabinets will be made out of 4/4 stock. I'm thinking purpleheart for the carcase with maple drawer fronts and purpleheart drawer pulls.

[T.J.]

Crooked Tail said:

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At least the drawers / cabinets will be made out of 4/4 stock. I'm thinking purpleheart for the carcase with maple drawer fronts and purpleheart drawer pulls.

---

I don't know, CrookedTail. If you do the drawers like that and couple them with what you've already done, you might just get yourself a reputation of having the purdy-est bench around. A *ahem* girly bench. :

Seriously, its really taking shape and I for one am proud of the perseverance you've shown in getting this far.

Congratulations. You're going to have yourself an heirloom bench.

[preservinglogs]

Great thread. That is indeed one big heavy hunk of a bench slab. I'm not sure I understand what you meant about shoulders for the dog mortises. What did you do and how did it turn out?

About the planing/scraping: I have a LV scraper plane and I have the dickens of a time setting it up to work correctly. I don't know what I am doing wrong, but I can't seem to get consistent fine shavings. So, you might want to investigate a little before taking that plunge.

I would also be really interested to know how you go about doing the huge dovetails with handtools. How does it differ from the regular little ones? I asked this before on here and got some wise-crack replies that it's the same approach as the little ones. But, I can't imagine that huge dovetails in Hard Maple and Purple Heart are done the same as sawing and chopping poplar or pine secondary wood of drawer sides.

I hear it's like 119 degrees in your parts. Is that garage air conditioned?

[Crooked Tail]

Here is a quick sketchup drawing of how I did the dogholes. The light tan piece is a separate piece of wood you cut out and then epoxy into the dado. The theory I guess is that just cutting a dado and gluing that piece in is supposed to be easier than shaping the dogholes with a chisel.



If I had known better, I wouldn't have done it that way. I don't think it was any easier, because cutting and fitting all those pieces was a PITA. I think it looks ugly also. Not that you can really see it, but "normal" dogholes seem much nicer / cleaner.

I actually did cut these DTs just like I cut small ones. But I'm a newbie at this, so just because I did it doesn't mean it's a good idea. It probably means the opposite.

I had to clamp the pieces flat horizontal on my bench instead of vertical like I'm used to. So I sat on top of my bench and leaned over them to cut them. I'm using a Lynx "dovetail" saw, which has a deeper blade than the "real" DT saws I've seen (i.e., Adria, LN, etc.). The blade just barely was deep enough to cut these tails (a little over 2"). I can see that it would be a problem if your saw couldn't "reach" the bottom of the cuts.

There was a casualty.


I guess it is hard to see in the pic, but I split the handle all the way down. I did that chopping the sockets' end grain. I only have these chisels, but if I had a whole bunch I certainly wouldn't use my good dovetail chisels. I'd use mortise chisels.

I tell ya what, purple or not, Purpleheart is no girly wood! So hopefully my "hurley burley girly bench" will last a couple generations.

(It's only about 100 here. It's 119 down south in Vegas. I'm a couple hundred miles north of Vegas. No air conditioning though. )