I did fairly large stub tenons for the legs at the top and bottom. Cut out with a skill saw then wasted all the material with a chisel before cleaning up with a rebate and block plane.
I used a dowel maker which is basically an upgraded pencil sharpener to make a whole load of dowelling. The joints were draw bored and then pegged to make a pretty solid frame... I don't think it will be coming apart any time soon.
The vice was a bit of a fiddle to put together and to get it to run properly. I probably should have read the instructions a little better but they were in Canadian so everything was imperial and I was using metric drill bits.. Got it running sweet though and its a really really smart vice. I left the vice a bit proud with the intention of planing it down perfectly flush with the top after fitting.
Test fitting the Veritas brass dogs and wonder dogs. Cant wait to put them to use.
Bolted the frame to the top as its pretty heavy and if I need to move it anywhere in the future it would be a lot easier to move it separately rather than if it was one single bench. Fitted a western red cedar shelf underneath. I used Osmo top oil to give it a nice resistant finish - I use matt oil as I personally am not a fan of shiny wood.
All it needs now is a handle for the vice!
Its been a while since I made something for myself and after getting very inspired by other peoples workbenches I decided to embark on creating my own workbench that fits my needs.
Certain criteria had to be met
- Methods of holding any shaped bit of timber firmly but also with the ability to do certain tasks such as routing and sanding without any interference from clamps or such
- A shelf to hold tools that are in constant use.
- Heavy enough to be hold timber being Hand planed without rocking.
- Decent sized vice which is strong enough for hand planing jobs.
I started with the top which I made out of some really nice kiln dried oak. It was sawn into 3 inch thick pieces, planed/thicknessed then joined together with dominos. The domino is a great bit of kit and makes this kind of job a lot easier as it keeps the boards perfectly aligned.
I cleaned all the glue lines off the top and roughly planed it flat with a mixture of a low angle jack and a smoothing plane. I decided to go with a mixture of brown oak and normal oak for the legs as I quite like this theme and have used it before.
I used Brown oak for the vice as well. All the brown oak came from a log I milled quite a few years ago with my father back on the farm we used to run our firewood business from. The Veritas large front vice kit I bought was originally green but I decided I wanted to paint it black as it seemed to match the Brown oak better.
Everything cleaned up, I can't resist putting chamfers on things...
I chose to use Veritas bench accessories as they are pretty well made and the brass looks pretty bling. I drilled out 19mm holes in the top to accommodate these. Drilling pretty much perfectly square holes was a lot easier with this drill holder I bought off Axminster.
