Chuck
Thanks for writing, I feel better. I laughed, but your note struck a chord and
made me sentimental.....And FYI if benches had genes, I'd swear your bench's
clone is out in my garage. And I do love it. Literally.
I hear about guys planing their tops.....I used to paint mine every couple
years, but as life accellerated, having and raising 7 kids, running a big
baseball program, keeping the house up, restoring several cars, all while
managing to keep my job, I didn't make the time.
Im glad i didnt, because now I think of my bench as my journal.
The stripes of Testors Panzer Grey do sometimes rub off on my work, but they are
the memory of my son's freshman project; we built a working trebuchet that when
tuned could throw a 5/16 x 9/16 nut about 120 feet. He will graduate HS soon and
if he doesn't make the cut for the Red Sox, wants to me a mechanical or civil
engineer. He still has the trebuchet somewhere.
The greasy orange-brown smear looks like a biohazard, but that's a remnant of
restoring a corner curio stand that has been in my wife's family for
generations out of mind......my father in law loves dark brown stain ("it's
colonial!") and gloss urethane....very careful stripping reveals it's
mahogany.....except for the pieces that had been repaired with pine, or cedar,
or some indeterminate wood.....some with hide glue, others with cut nails, so by
itself it's a history lesson of sorts. Yes I planed it all smooth and shiny, but
I left the amateur repairs, and used the square nails for part of it.
The bench has some old holes I cut in it because I was careless with a hole saw,
or a drill. Others I cut on purpose, where and when i needed to have a bench
dog.......by which I really mean plastic pieces from a Workmate I bought the
year I got married, 1993. They still work, banged in with a hammer..
The front edge has the first saw cuts my now 14 year old ever pulled.
Some people have really nice Record face vices.....I have a Columbian stand up
that my father in law gave me when he moved into assisted living. I'm not sure
it closes square, and it must weigh 150lbs, but he got it used......in 1964. The
only place I could mount it was the right hand corner, right where my elbow will
find it when I'm hyper focused on a carving or cutting with the 20s vintage
Simonds he gave me with the vice. My right elbow is rounded off from that vice,
and it probably has enough of my DNA in it to call it a relative.
Now i want a tail vice and nice neat rows of holes, and a wood screw face vice,
and a surface that wont vibrate when I plane. So I will finish my fancy
bench.....and when I look at the hairlines in the far side slab, will notice the
aprons and near side slab don't have hairlines, and I'll remember how that bench
taught me to glue, with a lot of help and encouragement from some generous men I
never met.......
So I'll finish it, but nobody can take my old nasty bench unless they pry it
from my cold dead fingers. :)
See, I toldja your note made me sentimental.
Thanks for making the time to write,
Mark.
Sent from my iPad
On Aug 2, 2015, at 4:59 PM, Chuck Taylor wrote:
> Mark,
>
> You wanna hear a horror story about building a workbench? Long ago and far
away, I was a 20-something-year-old Naval officer stationed in Charleston, SC. I
read an article in Southern Living or Sunset Magazine about building a couch
from 4x4's and rope. I went to the local Borg and bought some Southern Yellow
Pine (SYP) 4x4's, not realizing that they were sopping wet, or, if they were,
what the consequences of that might be. The plan included drilling 1" holes for
threading rope through the frame to support cushions. My tools included a hand
saw, a Skil saw, a brace and bit, a Stanley #4 plane Made in the 1970's, and
some saw horses I had built. About halfway through the project, the 4x4's
started to bow and twist. I got mad and decided to go with Plan B. Plan B was to
rip the 4x4's into 2x4's and build a workbench. I used the Skil saw to do the
ripping, two passes each. A lot of the resulting 2x4's had 1" holes bored in
them, either in thickness or transversly.
>
> I built the bench base by nailing together 2x4's using 2" finishing nails,
including the top and bottom stretchers (short and long stretchers, top and
bottom). Dimensions are 2 feet wide by 4 feet long by about 34" high. For the
top I cut a bunch of 2x4's into 2-foot lengths and nailed them transversely to
the long top stretchers. That makes the top about 1.5" thick in most places.
>
> No part of that bench is square or plumb or level. It wobbles when I tried to
plane anything. I can't plane the top flat because of the nails. As the wood
dried, gaps appeared between the boards on the top (inevitable because of the
way I oriented the grain of the top boards). There were 1" holes in random
places (which was great for losing small pieces of hardware). No glue was used.
>
>
> Some 39 years later, that bench is still in use. It has survived 5 moves (2 of
which were across an ocean). I've added a few braces and a couple of vises and
plugged the holes in the top over the years, so it isn't quite as rickety as it
once was, but it's still rickety. And I still love it. It's my "dirty" bench. If
I spill oil on it, no problem. If I pound on it, no problem. That SYP is nearly
as hard as a rock. If my chisel slips into the bench surface, no problem. If the
black swarf from sharpening with my oilstones gets on it, no problem. I actually
find the gaps between the top boards useful when I need to cut sandpaper with a
utility knife (when I can find the bench's top). Ed Minch has seen this bench in
person and can testify to its faults.
> So, Mark, don't despair. Just because your new bench top doesn't look pretty
doesn't mean that it can't be useful. I learned a lot from building my first
workbench. So will you.
>
> I've been intending to build a new, more proper bench for quite some time now.
I actually started building it only 7 years ago, and it is at last nearing
completion. Stay tuned for a report after it is finally finished, which will be
Real Soon Now (measured of course in Galoot Time).
>
> Chuck Taylor
> north of Seattle
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