Torsion box workbench for hand tool use?

[Jim Matthews]

An inexpensive alternative is butcher block from Ikea.
If you can't find the thickness you're after, glue and screw two countertops together.

I dunno how far you are from Tempe, but the Ikea website says they're open.
http://www.ikeahackers.net/2012/04/w...age-units.html

[Jared Walters]

I tried a couple weeks ago but they said they sell out same day they come in and they aren't expecting any more until February.

[Roderick Gentry]

Torsion box makes a great bench. Even on the conventional bench the pounding area was traditionally over the right side leg. If you make an essentially solid web over a few inches in that area, you will have an all solid area right down to the floor.

Even baring that, you need to figure that bench top stiffness goes up to the cube of the thickness. So some people work on a solid core door, about 1,5 inches thick. If the beam was 5,5 inches a logical size for a ply torsion box, it would be almost 50 times stiffer than the solid core door, on a form basis, if it was solid also. On those numbers below you are still only loosing about 33 percent of the stiffness in the hollow box form, and the webs affect that positively. Real calcs get a lot more complicated, and materials, and fiber orientation come into play. But a 25X advantage is hard to whittle away.

A final way to look at it is to consider your floor. It isn't even a torsion box, it consists of a piece of potentially inferior ply, of lessor thickness, half the stiffness, over joists on probable 16" centers, with no webs every 8 inches or so. Yet my floor is stiff enough to work on.

I have a torsion bench, and 2-3 solid benches. My torsion bench was made up out of a single sheet of ply, it is about 6 inches deep. It was for a Jap. style bench which is essentially a planing beam with trestles. But as "radical" as japanese benches are often portrayed to be, it is basically the euro bench with tool tray, in a demountable form.

The top is dead nuts flat, never moves, does not waste any energy, and is light enough to stick under one arm and carry upstairs. Cost thirty bucks of HD, paint grade, ply. However, a better material would be something like interior grade mershawa, and prettier also.

Where you have real problems, none of them insurmountable, would be in adding your vises, dog holes, hold downs. It is like planing a deck hardware layout on a boat. I think it would be less worth doing the more stuff you have to plan into it. Eventually it could end up solid.

The way I built mine was, though I have all the saws in the world... I went to HD that has really nice panel saws. I got them to saw the top and bottom, then I got the rest sawn into equal width web pieces. So something like 12", 12", and the rest around 4", but to maintain the yield I had to come up with a number where they would all come out the same with kerfs. Plus, you never know who is going to saw the stuff, and what mistakes they will make. So a little extra is nice.

So then when you get it home, you use the first 4 pieces for the tube, and then saw off two end caps, and then saw the rest as webs. You only need a web every foot or so. But you will have a lot of stock, and you want some doublers in the areas you will pound over. Just distribute them as you see fit, and nail the whole thing together with glue. Of course your mileage may vary.

Overall, I prefer solid wood tops, but laminated butcher type tops are probably my least favorite. I originally made the ply top because I couldn't find a solid pine beam for my trestle bench. I did eventually find one, but I have never used it, the ply one is so good I have never replaced it on this bench.