The Great Bench Making Class of 2003

 

 

The process all started with 10 avid wood workers, from various parts of the country, wanting to make a fine cabinetmakers bench for themselves.  Combine that with John Wilson’s offering for the final “Build Your Own Woodworker’s Bench Class” (April 25-27, 2003) and a marriage was made in heaven.   Six of the students chose to make the 8-foot bench and 4 of the students chose to build the 6-½ foot bench.  The standard 8-foot design is shown in the picture below with John Wilson.

 

 

 

John Wilson is best know as a classic oval box-maker/box-maker part supplier/box-maker instructor, but he was offering this as his final bench making class, as he was trying to use up his stores of bench making materials.

 

As I arrived, John was telling the group of avid bench-maker wanna-be’s about the process of building a cabinet makers bench and relating stories of those who have come to his establishment before.  Now I have to say, John is a very good instructor to take a class with, a hard worker who takes great patients to ensure that each participant is satisfied with the end product.

 

Most of the wood used to make these benches was dry wood, however the design and class was structured around building either a dry wood or green wood bench.  Extra time was spent detailing the practice of cutting green wood into raw stock and allowing for shrinkage in the bench design, both in the written supplied material and orally during the class. 

                                            

 

John had a groups of material stacked together to for each bench project.  For the most part, the wood package selection process was done by random drawing.  A couple of wood packages were partly pre-assembled for students with special needs.  John cut sticks to varying length and asked each of the remaining class members to draw a stick, longest stick got to pick first.  Yours truly got first pick (hey don’t look at me I got to pick last).

 

 

Now I wanted the black walnut material, but couldn’t take it.  I had made previous arrangement with John to bring my own Emmert pattern makes vice and twin-screw tail vice for my bench.    

 

 

The Emmert had special bench design considerations, which required a solid top.  Ralph, who had previously selected the solid top design, was gracious enough to pass it on to me, Thank you Ralph.

 

 

 

The solid maple top measured 2” thick x 20” wide x 8 ‘ long, one beautiful piece of wood.  The rest of my package was white oak.

 

Now don’t get to feeling to bad for the guy who gave me the solid wood top, because he got to choose next and picked the solid black-walnut table package.  I think he was still happy…J

 

   

 

I think the black-walnut package was the most coveted package.   However, all of the bench packages were nice, there were even some bird-eye maple tops and highly figured oak tops.

 

The process of building 10 benches in three days required that process steps be divided

into tasks with groups of students performing each task until it was finished (without grouping task the process would have surely taken a week to complete).  A few of the bench tops were already glued up and planed to finished, but for the most part the tops had to be planed down to within an eight inch of finished size, joined on one edge and glued up.  Yours truly, was put on the glue-up group. 

 

 

 

Gluing up the pieces required that 5 ½ inch alignment dowels be drilled into each of the pieces being glues together.   The boards were place on the glue-up table, temporarily clamped together to inspect the future joint.  Dowel location lines were drawn across the joint in 5 places.  Each piece was then placed on edge and a doweling jig was used to ensure proper doweling location.  We made the doweling jig out of a scrap piece of wood, drilled a ½ inch hole perpendicular to the base. 

 

 

The base of the jig was placed on the edge of the piece to be glued, aligned up with the front face and a centerline, which was drawn center to the drilled hole.  We clamped the jig to the wood and hand drilled each hole.  Each piece had its own particular warps and bends; the glue up team took this into consideration when placing the dowel locations.  We got pretty good at this and the finished piece actually went together pretty easily and came out requiring minimal planning to finish.  If you consider that each of these pieces were over 2 inches thick and over 8 foot long handling and gluing up the pieces was no minor task.

 

 

 

 

While the glue up team was hard at work other teams were processing the legs, cross members, and rails for assembly.

 

Although the bench making was a group effort, there were individual tasks and choices that had to be completed prior to putting your own set of bench material into the queue to be manufactured by the team working on those tasks.  Each student had to determine the proper height of their own bench and layout the orientation of the cross-members and rails to ensure proper cutting of the mortises in each leg.  My own bench had to have shorter rails (by 6”) to accommodate the special requirements of my two vises.

 

Students chamfered their own legs prior to putting them into the mortise-cutting queue.

 

 

 

The next step was cut 4 mortises in each leg; two for the shorter cross members and two for the longer rails.  Each student performed their own layout of the tops of their own set of legs.  Consideration had to be to be made for which side of each leg faced out, which sides was to receive the shorter cross-member, and which side was to receive the longer rails.  The height of each rail or cross-member was important to ensure that the spacing for the top support and bottom rail would be in the proper location.  When flipping these around in the jig it would have been fairly easy to cut the mortises in the wrong location without the markings.  Picture below illustrates one fairly good method for marking the ends.

 

The triangle allows the legs to be separated and later be put back in the proper placement, the arrows ensure that the right sides be placed up in the jig, a standard numbering scheme allows for proper determination of the cross-members and rails.

 

Everyone’s legs except Ralph’s legs were cut in the jig with a router, Ralph hand cut his with a chisel.  He did admit that he probably would have chosen the router method had his legs been the harder white oak.

 

 

 

While the mortises were being cut another group was cutting the tenons on the end of each of the cross-members and rails, a third group was drilling the holes to allow the nuts and bolts, which tied the whole thing together. 

 

 

John explained that this method works pretty good to ensure that the bench can be tightened up after shrinkage occurs.  He did caution that anyone who had the oak legs should use stainless steel nuts & bolts as oak contains a corrosive agent which will rust the bolts in a relatively short time.

 

The final long hole through the ends of the cross-members and rails was drilled by hand after assembly. 

 

 

After each pair of end leg assemblies were assembled the rails were assembled to connect the whole stand assembly together.

 

 

 

 

With the base assemblies nearing completion other teams began drilling attachment and dog holes in the tops.

 

 

 

Drilling and assembling tool trays

 

 

With all of this work proceeding on the standard bench design (with the tool trays), I began to layout my solid top for attachment to the now completed base.

 

 

I should back up here for a moment and say that after close consideration of the requirements of both of my vises it was decided to add a piece to the side of my solid top to make the width 24 inches (same as the standard bench width)

 

 

The position of the base was carefully laid out to get the location of the legs as close to the Emmert vise as possible.  This was done to help support the approximate 100-pound weight of the big vise.  Three top supports were also made and sized with shims to make the top surface as straight as possible.

 

 

With the layout complete I clamped each of the top supports to the top and used a brace with a long drill to drill through the top of the bench.

 

 

 

After drilling I flipped the table over, counter-bored the hole from the top (we were using carriage bolts) and secured the top to the base.   My net step was to cut out the 1 1/2 “ deep front pocket for the Emmert and the ¼” deep top pocket to allow the Emmert mounting plate to fit level with the vise (I actually cut this so the metal plate would fit a little lower than the wood top).  I used a Stanley 71 router plane and chisels to cut the pocket and a saber-saw to cut the 1-½ deep relief pocket.  If I had it to do over again I would have cut it by hand since the blade wondered so much. 

 

 

I decided to mount the Emmert with the extend mount configuration rather than a flush mount.  I seem to remember that a flush mounted configuration required pulling the vise up to flip it.   I also decided to add a sideboard to the bench. With the thickness equal to the inside board face of the vice.    I planned to do that at my house when I mounted the twin-screw vice.

 

Well back to the collaborative projective….

 

Work was proceeding on the tops as a group was mortising pockets one each top to allow the for the flush mounting of the standard bench vises.

 

 

 

 

 

The final step was to put the whole bench together.  Several groups got together and made these steps into processes too.   One team assembled the vises on the tops, one made and attached the wooden vise jaws while other assembled the tops and tool trays to the bench stands.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All this considered, the bench making class is a lot of hard work, but in this case the end certainly justified the means.

 

John Wilson demonstrating his dowel making equipment.   We used the equipment to make plugs to cover the bolts and some students made up some bench dogs.