I’m ready to attach the top to the base finally of my Roubo style workbench. This is based on the one in Chris Schwarz’s book. I’m making it out of hard maple. Most of the techniques I’m using are new to me, so I’m learning a lot, and it is a lot of fun too.
The Ultimate Workbench – Part 7
I’ll be assembling the base of my new Roubo workbench. This is pretty exciting, as it’s been a long road getting this far, with a lot of new skills I needed to learn, such as planing and jointing, and my first mortise and tenon joints. It’s been a bunch of pieces that didn’t look like much, but now I’ll finally be putting it together! I’m a little nervous too, about gluing all the parts, getting them together and getting all the drawbored dowels into the tenons with plenty of glue too.
The Ultimate Workbench – Part 6
I’m finishing up the last few items before I can glue up the base, which will be exciting (and I’m a bit nervous about it too). I’ll be drilling dowel holes in the legs for the tenons, drilling three 3/4″ dog holes in the right leg, and drilling out the hole for the Benchcrafted Glide M leg vise screw in the left leg.
While I am left handed, I do some things left handed, some right, and sometimes it doesn’t matter, I can use either hand. I thought about it, and decided to go with the leg vise as standard, on the left side of the bench.
The Ultimate Workbench – Part 5
The continuing story of my Roubo Workbench, based on the book by Christopher Schwarz. In this part, I will be doing the 8 mortises for the stretchers to fit into the legs, and showing how I made the dowels out of some white oak. A lot of the YouTube videos crack me up, because the person always says they just happened to have the wood “lying around”. Sometimes what they had lying around is quite a bit of wood. An actual fact: I happened to have this white oak just lying around. I did not have all this hard maple wood just lying around though.
The Ultimate Workbench – Part 4
Forward progress finally got a bit faster. I had a lot of trouble with the top of the bench, getting it smoother out. I used a hand plane to do 95% of the work, and that did work for the most part. I had a lot of trouble with tearout, the plane blade tearing away wood, digging far deeper than the blade would have cut. I had to stop with the plane. I tried using a back bevel on the blade to increase the angle for less tearout, which I think helped, however I was still having the issue. I switched to sanding, an extremely tedious workout! I didn’t know how else to get it flat. Remember, this is the entire top of the bench, far too large to go into the 13″ planer.
Making a sharpening plate holder
Trying to use the diamond plates, or stones if you have those, without a way to hold them in place is a pain. I quickly decided to make a holder for my DMT Diamond plates. Several of the ones I saw online used a chisel to dig a slot into the plywood base for the plate to rest in. I thought it would be far easier to just glue on some thin plywood strips, as my chisel skills aren’t the greatest. I used 3/4″ plywood as a base, and thin strips of 1/4″ baltic birch plywood around the stones. Dimensions weren’t critical, I have the 8″ plates, it depends on what stones or plates you have as to how big you will make yours. Also, yours may only hold three plates, it just depends on how many plates or stones you will be wanting to hold.