Construction of workbench top

[Mike Holbrook]

I have the wood for my top, German dried Beech boards 8" feet long x 8/4 x around 9". I have a new Laguna band saw to rip boards. I have put together a group of nice hand and bench saws for cross cutting and making the joints. I have nice refurbished, or hand made drills and planes. I have the hardware for the vices. The hold up for me at this point is figuring out whether or not I want to try and tackle the bench top with hand planes or not. An old friend of mine thinks I should buy a planer of some sort. He has been after me for years to buy one. My buddy does not think I should tackle a surface that size with the hand planes. Bob Lang made the top for the 21st Century workbench I am modifying in my plan with powered equipment.

I have quite a few furniture and cabinet projects I want to do. As much as I would like to do everything with hand tools I am wondering if trying to level large surfaces by hand will slow me down so much that I want get many of the things I want to do done. I am interested in opinions of how others would attack a group of projects of this type in terms of the larger solid wood surfaces? Please include actual information on specific tools.

Thanks guys,

[RickT Harding]

So I did half and half. I took my three boards I used to make the to over to a friends shop that had some larger equipment to joint and plane to thickness. Then he helped me out by using dominos as alignment aids, and I flattened things after the glue up by hand.

I used a #5 jack, #6, and a #8 to do the final flattening. The #8 with the extra mass and width was nice on the bench top, but honestly I don't think I've used it since. My #7 has been enough for the hall table/entertainment center tops I've done since then. I actually really like my #6 size-wise for most things unless they get too long.

While I do a lot of work by hand, I do use a planer for my original thickness work. I find it a nice compromise and it gives me a nice break from flattening the first side by hand to go over and run it through the planer to bring it down close to the needed thickness. What's nice is that I can keep wider boards going this way since I do flatten the first side by hand which is great for larger projects.

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[Russell Sansom]

In order to plane the boards in a planer of some sort, you need to joint them first. You might consider an 8" jointer.
Here in the bay area there are a couple cooperative workshops where you can rent time on the big machines. It's also feasible to pay a shop in your neighborhood to joint and plane your boards. But once you glue them together into a top the boards will never be exactly co-planer, so you still need to flatten the finished top anyway. Chances are you won't find machinery big enough to do that. As an aside, you can let the resultant identical irregularities in the underside go.
It is hard to gauge your ambition and skill. Putting together a flat, clean top with vices and a proper stretcher to hold it off the floor is a serious challenge and you'll probably spend a month full time, as a crude guess. If you haven't chopped mortises and sawed tenons, for instance, that's going to take some time to figure out. They are relatively forgiving for a first project, but someday they will embarrass you and you might want to do them over.

If it were me, I'd would join the 8" boards edge to edge using splines ( would require an awkward operation on a table saw or fairly easy operation with a router) or dowels. I've never used biscuits, but I suppose that would work as well. Then I would embrace the challenge of flattening the top with a jack and a #7 or #8 jointer. If the two or three boards are seriously non co-planer, a scrub plane speeds things up. Or put a big radius on a spare blade for you jack. You will feel like the master of your universe once you've achieved this. It really depends on your goals and your vision for yourself as a woodworker.

BTW, be careful! A mass of lumber that size is slippery, awkward, and extremely dangerous once it is raised any distance off the floor ( tremendous potential energy ).
One gotcha in this is the requirement for a long straightedge. You'll also need a pair of winding sticks but two identical straight edges will do the trick, especially if you set up an SLR type camera/tripod up to do the sighting instead of using your eye. If this all sounds way outside your current interest or skill, you can lay down a sheet of MDF on top of the hardwood as some people do. I wouldn't, but that's me.
Good luck,
russ

[David Posey]

For me, the biggest factor would be determined by the surface I had to plane on now. I'm sure you've heard before that you need a bench to build a bench, and the biggest reason for this is how difficult it is to plane things without an appropriate workholding device. If you have a bench that can handle your lumber and are building this one as a replacement, then go ahead and plane it by hand if that's the experience you want. If you don't have something that will handle your lumber, I would seriously consider contacting a local shop about jointing and planing the boards. Doing the kind of work you need to do to make a benchtop on a mediocre planing setup is far more trouble than it's worth.

Like Russell says, you're probably going to have to flatten it by hand once everything is together anyway. Your other options would be a router jig or finding a shop with a wide belt sander. Purchasing a planer doesn't seem like a good investment, unless you plan on using it to thickness pieces a lot in the future. You would still need a jointer or some sort of setup to let you joint by hand, so it makes more sense to me to either do it all by hand or find a shop that will do it for you.

By the way, you can make a straightedge and winding sticks easily enough. Extruded aluminum angle pieces from the home center also work well as winding sticks, although the wooden ones are almost always prettier.

[Mike Holbrook]

Thanks for the great thoughts guys.
As always it is hard to tell how much to say on the front end. My lumber is not exactly raw. My lumber supplier gave me one "good" side and edge from the raw wood with his machines. I bought wood (steam dried German Beech?) that I hope will be comparatively stable, so far so good. The boards were not worked for thickness though. I have 6 boards that are 8.5-10" x 2" wide. The boards have been adjusting to my shop environment on the wood rack for 3-4 months. I am planing to rip the boards on my band saw to get around 8" of width out of each of them. I believe I can get a bench at least 83-86" long. I have the Benchcrafted Plan for their Split Top Rubo Which uses about that length. The leg vise will be from the Benchcrafted plan the top and frame will be more of Bob's plan, but with one top pieces wider and the other narrower.

I have a 54-55" Hammer Bench I bought and a 5+' old bench I made from two pieces of 3/4" ply with masonite top and doubled 2x4 frame. Another option is a contractor table saw with 66" rails and movable extension, on a rolling frame. I may be able to rig something up with one of those and a piece of MDF. I have a couple good adjustable roller outfeeds. I also have a Festool Table. Bob made a jig to fit between saw horses to make his top. I am wondering how wide to rip the boards? I am guessing that more boards in each piece will reduce the chance of splitting and wider boards will obviously be less glue work & mess.

Planes: LV, LA Jack, LV, LA Block, old Record #7 & #4.5, Blum Tool Works 17" Mesquite Fore Plane. I made four wood planes from Purple Heart parts I bought from Steve Knight when he shut down his plane making business, two 7.5" smooth (regular & high angle), 15.5" Jack, 26" Jointer. The final sizes of the planes I made may change. I left them as long as I could to start. I have 25-30 good clamps up to 40". I know there is no such thing as too many! I am tuning up the collection of hand/panel saws I bought at auction and I have three nice bench saws, 9" dovetail TFWW, 14" Sash TFWW, 16" ebay win from a SMC member. I practice with them and I am working on my sharpening skills as well so I have decent skills. I need more experience with my chisels. I have the Barr set, a half dozen or so Ashley Isles and a couple 1 1/4, 1 1/2" old chisel "restores" from auctions. It might be fair to say I have decent knowledge of the craft but still lack experience. Most of my projects have been more construction, hanging cabinets, making tools to this point. My goal is to spiffy up my largely hand tool shop and build cabinets and furniture for home and our home based business.

[Jack Curtis]

Any way you cut it, you'll have to break the job into smaller pieces, unless, of course, you plan on getting a >= 24" planer. Broken down, it's not that much of a hand planing job, and you avoid those gobs of sniping on both ends.

[Russell Sansom]

An 8" + a 10" would give you a nice 18" bench. Or 10" + 10" for a sweet 20" bench. Can't necessarily see the strategy behind ripping them all to the same width although it's good to take a little off just to get a fresh face. In my opinion, there is no burning need to make each board the same thickness except where the bench legs meet it. I'd suggest getting the top co-planer and letting the back go where ever it ends up. There was a thread about this not too long ago. I worry about such things, so I often feel compelled to make the top and the bottom faces parallel, but I have no idea if that affects the movement of the bench top over time and I'd still advise somebody who hasn't made a bench to skip it and use that two days of hard work for something more productive and less speculative ( or downright superstitious ).

You could just joint the mill-finished edges and glue them together. 3 X 8" = 24" which most people feel is REALLY wide for a joinery bench but probably not unreasonable. Opinions vary. I like my 18" wide guy. I've built many harpsichords on it with no problems at all and it's way easier to true up twice a year than a REALLY wide bench would be.

A tracksaw ( you have a festool table ... do you have a track saw? ) is a very attractive option for leaving a fine enough edge that you wouldn't have too much jointing to do. I know we've all done it, but a board that size on a table saw gets pretty awkward. Your 26" Jointer should be panting to go on a date with a big hunk of beautiful 8/4 maple!

[Stuart Tierney]

I have the wood for my top, German dried Beech boards 8" feet long x 8/4 x around 9".

My small portable bench has a split top, same material as yours, same thickness, an inch wider but half the length.

It is no small irony that I also own a 10" wide jointer and 12" wide thickness planer and the front apron is firmly, but reversibly fixed to the top...


If you have access to the machines, by all means make them do the grunt work and follow up as needed with handplanes if you wish. I can do it by hand, I've done a bench top by hand before (more than once!), but I have the machines and there's no point making them collect more dust than the need to.

(Especially when you consider it might take 30-40 minutes to fool around and handplane them both flat and true, but the machines take 3-4 minutes.)

By all means go luddite if that's your goal, but there's no need to wallow in it if you don't want to.

Stu.

[Charlie Stanford]

I have the wood for my top, German dried Beech boards 8" feet long x 8/4 x around 9". I have a new Laguna band saw to rip boards. I have put together a group of nice hand and bench saws for cross cutting and making the joints. I have nice refurbished, or hand made drills and planes. I have the hardware for the vices. The hold up for me at this point is figuring out whether or not I want to try and tackle the bench top with hand planes or not. An old friend of mine thinks I should buy a planer of some sort. He has been after me for years to buy one. My buddy does not think I should tackle a surface that size with the hand planes. Bob Lang made the top for the 21st Century workbench I am modifying in my plan with powered equipment.

I have quite a few furniture and cabinet projects I want to do. As much as I would like to do everything with hand tools I am wondering if trying to level large surfaces by hand will slow me down so much that I want get many of the things I want to do done. I am interested in opinions of how others would attack a group of projects of this type in terms of the larger solid wood surfaces? Please include actual information on specific tools.

Thanks guys,

With stock sitting at 8/4, very close to finished thickness for a benchtop by most anybody's definition, you'll need to have an ultra-precise glue up to keep from introducing twist into the top the result of which could necessitate a lot of stock removal to fix. The bottom of the top needs to be flat too - remember this - or it won't register flat to whatever undercarriage you intend to build. So, any twist introduced at glue up has to come off both sides. You could potentially lose a lot of stock with a careless glue up and end up with a top much thinner than you'd planned.

That said, if you are careful and know how to use winding sticks, and are patient, then there is not real reason why you can't dress the glue up to a finished, flat state. Flawless, baby-butt smoothness isn't really required. Smooth is a surface attribute, flat is a geometric concept. Focus on the latter.

[Mike Holbrook]

Yes, I have the smaller Festool Saw. I made a post when I was trying to decide whether to buy a bandsaw or not. I was thinking about buying a larger Festool saw or using the one I have for the long rips. I did some experimenting, ripping 2x6 with my saw and determined that I wanted to go the bandsaw route for ripping stock. I got a Laguna LT14 SUV combo with DriftMaster fence and 1 1/4" Resaw King blade from the local WoodCraft at a decent deal.

The wood I have has a rough edge, so it will need to be ripped at least once. If I decide to go thicker than 2" for the top it will mean a bunch of ripping. Although I think 2" thick would work, I am a little worried about how much of that 2" I might loose flattening. I think the challenge would be getting the glue up done well enough to preserver most of the woods "stock" thickness. I'm wondering if 2" wide as opposed to 2" thick boards, allowing me to make a 3-4" thick top might produce a better, thicker top and reduce glue up error?

I have some 8/4" Ash & Hickory. I am thinking I will make a saw bench or two with it first. An Ash or Hickory saw bench may be over kill, but it would give me a chance to hone skills with smaller wood.

[Mike Holbrook]

Hope it is ok to revive this thread. I went through a long period of physical problems with my hands that kept me from getting started on this project.

Somewhere Bob Lang, author of the design for the 20th Centrury Workbench I am building posted on one of my posts. Bob commented, a few years after making his bench, he would make a few changes regarding the work surface. First he said he would not make the two top pieces the same size. Second Bob said he would make the tool trays in the center of his Rubo smaller. So now I am trying to figure out what size to make my two surfaces and the tray between them. Bob's plan called for two 11 3/4" top pieces and trays 7 1/2" wide, making a 31" wide total top. I want to get started on my top but would like to hear from those who have built benches regarding their work surface area.

I am thinking about picking up a Steel City 13 inch Helical Head with CARBIDE CUTTERS 40300HC. Bob uses a similar planer to make his top in his video and it seems to be a favorite on these pages recently. I think this planer would work well for other solid wood projects I want to make too.

Assuming I make the planer purchase. I can make my front top section 12" x 3-4". I wonder if 12" is big enough? I wonder about how large to make the second section too, maybe 8-10". As I recall, Bob did not explain why he did not like having the two equal sides or what size he would make his two sections if he did the project again. I know 24" is a favorite size for bench tops, but as I recall most of the 24" tops I have seen were solid tops.

The small Hammer bench I have is 51 1/2" long with a 13 1/2" work surface and (built in) 5 1/2" tool area ( total 20" work surface). I think the flippable work "drawers" (center section) Bob's design calls for will be an improvement on the built in open section on the current bench. A 24-26 total work surface 86- 90" long seems popular but not having used a bench of that size it is hard to guess. The area I plan to place the bench in works perfectly with a bench a little under 8" long, more length want fit. I am hoping to use the existing bench to build the new one, but I would have about 2' hanging off each end. I do have two good work support stands. I am planing to build two sawbenches and a couple saw horses too. Will I be better off building the top on a couple of low benches supporting a sheet of 3/4" plywood? Bob used two 2x4 & plywood work tables and stresses the importance of having a good level surface to make the bench top on.

[Russell Sansom]

Paul Sellers has some well-done tutorials on Youtube for making a bench without a bench. They might give you some encouragement and some ideas.

[Kurt Cady]

I'm actively working on my mini-Roubo at the moment. it will be about 6' long and also serve as table saw outfeed.

I'm going in a little different direction than you are and my tops will be about 18" wide in the front and 12" wide in the back. My "tool tray" will be the slotted kind and about 2.5-3" wide. I will be able to flip pieces of the tool tray to act as a planing stop

[David Weaver]

I'm not familar with the bob lang bench, or any of the attributes, but if you have decent hands now and the wood isn't twisted all over the place, I would probably still do it with hand tools if I felt like it.

A thickness planer is nice to have, even if it's the only power tool you ever have in the shop (so is a good bandsaw, but a capable thickness planer is cheaper).

I would buy an inexpensive smooth interior door (they are usually very flat) as a temporary top. They were the workbench of choice when I was building model airplanes as a kid. I'm sure they cost a lot more back then, but a hollow core door back then was about $25. You could probably find use for it after your build as a layout or assembly table if you got a decent quality solid core door, and it will probably be more rigid and flatter than two sheets of plywood.

[Curt Putnam]

The 24" thing seems to be the average reach limit for the average man. If you are taller/have longer arms and have the space then some wider is not an issue. I'm planning a split top as close to 4" thick as I can get - probably from soft maple. I have to rearrange the shop to get to an 8' bench but I'm also going to try for that. 8' long makes for some serious glue up issues because of space. I plan on laying two jointed and well waxed pieces of 2 x across two saw horses - that will provide a reasonably flat surface (only two contact points) that makes room for the clamps. I expect I will joint one edge (I have a bench that should be able to handle it - with extra support) and a Ridgid tailed jointer (which is probably too short for a good job on 8' stock.) I'll use the Ridgid only if I can't joint with my #7 or #8. I will run it through the tablesaw to make the other edge parallel and width consistent. I also have a Dewalt 735 which I will use for the major surfacing. At least that's the plan - infeed/outfeed support could be such an issue that I'll fall back on the aforesaid jointer planes.

So with the idea that I can physically execute the plan, I'm currently looking at two 12" x 4" sections with a 4" gap. I want two pieces because that's about all I can handle by myself but the gap is still an open question. I think four inches will allow for clamps and removable, task specific inserts. I do work with 24" wide panels a lot so I really want a bench that is at least 24". I also think the need for upper stretchers makes construction much easier. I plan on making them with a tongue that will fit a corresponding dado on the bottom of the top pieces. The top mostly rides on the stretchers so the leg connections aren't all that critical. The one leg with the leg vise needs to be planned out rather carefully. I want that to go through the top so that the vise chop bears on the leg and not the top. Still thinking about the other legs.

Later, Curt