Ever swing a baseball bat against a brick wall?
Lessons Learned Ipe Bench Revisited.
After seeing my original bench posting now linked in the Neander FAQs sticky thread I thought it might be helpful to add an update on lessons learned from that experiment and some photos of the revised bench.
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=24001
bench overview a.jpg
Lesson 1: A cleanly jointed 90 degree edge on an ipe board can produce deadly fine splinters and needle like slivers of wood.
Lesson 2: If building the top on a stable sub-base (MDF door), use only one continuous section of the MDF. Splitting the MDF door down its length allowed me to put dog holes down the middle (and sides) which were through solid wood. Unfortunately, this made the final top a lamination of 5 separate sub-laminations of varying thickness and with slightly varying movement characteristics.
Lesson 3: Screwing the 240+ pound table top down to the two cross members only at the centers of each member seemed like a reasonable method for allowing wood expansion/contraction without binding. Unfortunately, uneven tensions caused by lesson 2 (above) resulted in the top bowing up at the edges (approx 1/8 inch or so).
cross section original bench.jpg
Lesson 4: Glue creep is real. Lesson 3 resulted in large sections of the top being suspended slightly above the cross supports Unfortunately, the white and yellow glues did not like this situation. So after a few months, the heavier outside edges (~50 lbs of 4 laminated 1x4s) began to slide back down.
Lesson 5: My limited experience with epoxy and ipe was even worse. The epoxy did not creep, it cracked. This could be related to oils in the wood or the stresses involved in the way I clamped the final stage of assembling / joining two 120 pound slabs of wood. In either case, after dis-assembly, re-jointing, and re-assembly of the failed joint, I repaired it with regular Titebond.
cross section present bench.jpg
Lesson 6: If you like ugly gouges in your ipe boards or tabletop, just try to smooth or flatten it with a hand plane. Im certain the guru-status members of the neander group can plane it, but mere mortals should use a belt sander.
Lesson 7: Any oil you add to the table top will eventually seep back out over a period of weeks and months, leaving oil stains on other boards, papers, or cloth laying on the workbench.
Lesson 8: Random orbital sanding the naked top up to 600 grit will leave a polished finish that is hard to beat. No oil, poly, or shellac necessary.
Lesson 9: Although I started with ipe decking that was surfaced on four sides, the round-over edges on the boards results in a significant loss in plank width after squaring up the edges. Which leads to . .
Lesson 10: Start with thicker boards. My final build is now 52 boards wide! This increases the likelihood of alignment errors, which certainly added to the work of flattening the top.
Attachment 70318
Lesson 11: Flattening the top with a router worked well, but be sure to have some very stiff / sturdy rails for the router to ride on. Over the length of a long table, even two vertical 1x6s can bow a little with the weight of a heavy router and a tired woodworker pushing and leaning on the router.
Lesson 12: Prepare the underside of the bench top for any and all possible vise configuration you might be planning to install BEFORE you mount the top to the base. Ipe is hard to cut, chisel, or saw. It is even harder when you are laying on your back working under the bench.
emmert open a.jpg
Lesson 13: After widening the bench and adding several vises, including a 90 pound Emmert turtleback, the weight of the top has become a bit unwieldy for use with the Noden Adjust-A-Bench features. I need a base like Mr. Pans new bench.
Lesson 14: When you were a kid, did you ever swing a baseball bat against a brick wall or sidewalk? It is not something you ever do twice, unless youre entering your second childhood like me. I thought Id see which was tougher, my ipe bench or my ipe mallet head with hickory handle. Dont do it.
In summary;
I like the bench, and it still looks good when I clean it. But if I were to build another, Id probably build a variation on one of the Chris Schwarz benches; like maybe an 8 or 10 ft Holtzapffel with a twin wooden-screw vise and the BenchCrafted wagon tail vise.
Thanks for lookin,
rick
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Originally Posted by Bill White
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