Joiner's workbench v0

Early on I realized I wanted to make my own workbench. There are several major types, and then many different variants within those. I focused on the Roubo style and Chris Schwarz's "Anarchists Workbench." I knew whatever I did, it was going to be a huge effort making a bench with hand tools.

I really wanted to make it out of hard maple, which is traditional, but I knew that this was my first bench, I'm not exactly experienced, and it was probably not going to go well. Spending close to $2000 USD just on stock to have built something janky but having to live with it because of the cost would be heart breaking. Given that, I'd have preferred Southern Yellow Pine, to follow Chris' plans, but I live in Pennsylvania. Doug fir or bust, so Doug fir it is.

I wanted to close out 2025 with at least having the stock available.

The first order of business was making a bunch of stickers to space out the beams and let them acclimate to the shop. Then leave 'em alone for a couple months.

Months later, I got back to this and started by rough cutting the legs down. There's a fair amount of sketch in these boards, but my hope is I'll be able to get at least 4" out of them.

Fair to say some mistakes were made.

Anyway - skipping ahead, the glued up benchtop is a mess. It has a huge gap in it. I acquired a Festool track saw and the shop owner showed me how to use the jointer. This is where power tools enter my workflow.

I spend a bunch of time planing things down, and rejoin the pieces.

Next up is the frame. The mortises are drilled out with a forstner bit, then cleaned up by hand. I managed to drawbore three of the four legs successfully - which explains a problem, later.

The top is friction fit onto some small tenons in the frame, so it's easy to pop off as needed, but isn't going anywhere. It's not light.

The base isn't square, unfortunately, which is annoying. But also not something I'm going to fix. Lesson learned there.

That said, by the time I'm posting this, the bench has been in use for four months and I'm pretty pleased with it.

It still needs a leg vise and a tail vise - eventually.