All your base...

I've been scouring a radius of 90 miles trying to find wood for the base of this thing. I'm want maple, poplar or hickory. The thing is I can hardly find rough lumber big enough to get a 4"x4"x42" dimensioned piece. Let me retract that statement. I've found both hard maple and poplar that would do, but I ain't paying almost $250 for it. Only one local distributor has it and they charge a premium. The search continues.

Ends leveled...

I have leveled off the ends of the bench, and patched a terrible piece of tearout. But that's a post when I feel like reliving the experience. No pics yet. I'll try to post some soon.

Ready to level the ends...

Well, here it is. Sorry for the horrible picture but I was in a hurry. I had a pic I annotated for a friend, so I thought I'd share it here.

Time to glue up!

I applied glue to the plywood spline and the mortises and clamped them up. You can see that I didn't have pipe long enough for my pipe clamps. Fortunately, I did have 6 clamps. This is what I like to call "creative problem solving". You can use that on a resume, I did.

Dry fit...

Here's a pic of a dry fit of one end. It took forever to mortise out the end of the bench. I know there's a couple of marks left on the end, that's ok. The end is flat, and anyway that surface isn't a structural surface for glue (endgrain).

Mortis'...

I need to cut the mortise for the spline of the breadboard end. The end on the left was cut first with my router. I didn't like the way it came out, so I decide to cut the mortise on the other by hand. Unfortunately, I do not have a mortising chisel. I used my Irwin/Blue Marples paring chisels to cut the mortise on the right. The dimensions of the mortise on the left is 13/16" w x 18"l x 3/4" d. The mortise on the right is 13/16" x 4" x 1/2"d. Notice the difference in dimensions there? Yeah, took me 30 minutes to do the mortise on the right. I broke the Colt back out to finish it up. Well worth it.

Now it's time to square up the ends. Well... mostly square, cause I'm not perfecct. Yet. The bench at this point weighs at least 100 lbs. I tried cutting the ends by hand, but I made a real mess of one of the ends. Fortunately, I had left plenty of material for mistakes.
1. I setup two rollers on the right side of the blade with 2 2x4s. One 6' and one 8'.
2. I made a simple outfeed table out of a sawhorse to support the top at the end of the cut.
3. I screwed a piece of maple that fit in the t-slot to the underside of the bench top. I recovered the maple strip from a failed cross-cut sled.
4. I sawed away.

You can see from the burn marks that I had a difficult time on the first end. The maple did a pretty good job of holding the top straight but I didn't do a good job of pushing. The second end came out almost free of marks.

Did I mention that thing was heavy?

Ready for the ends...

So, now I'm ready to put on the breadboard ends. Why breadboard? Well... the maple pieces are face glued. So, if I just glued the walnut ends on it would be an end grain (maple) to long grain (walnut) butt joint. If you're a new woodworker, this is a big no-no. So, I'm going with breadboard end. If you need more information on breadboard ends... goto any of the woodworking forums and do a search in the archives. I promise you someone has already explained what they are, the benefits, and detriments of their use.

The Wood Whisperer...

I watch The Wood Whisperer (see link in the links bar) video podcast. Marc is great at getting concepts across in a manner that us weekend garage woodworkers can understand. Last night I watched his "live feed" and participated in the live chat. Got a couple of questions answered and I think for the finish on my workbench I'm going with BLO (boiled linseed oil) mixed with a little varnish. Of course, I'll try a test piece to see how it goes, but I'm thinking it'll do a good job of bringing out the contrast between the walnut and maple.

almost... flat....

I tried flattening this bad boy... man oh man... not done yet. I got the middle and the ends flat across the bench, but the length of the bench is way more difficult.

I need to buy or create some winding sticks so I can make sure it's not twisted.

Flattening...

Here's the tools used for flattening. I got it fairly flat. Not perfect. I plan on using the #80 scraper to get it flatter.

Trim time...

I added the walnut trim. I cut it pretty much the same way I did the maple. Glued it up the same too. I then hand planed it flat with the maple.

Flat... almost

I got it as close as I want before I add the trim. Here's a pic.

Top ready to flatten...

The clamps come off! There's a lot of glue squeeze out, which I think is

good. I started in with the scrub plane and worked my way up to a #80 cabinet scraper. My triceps are now the size of Hulk Hogan's.

In hindsight I wish I had put a clamping caul across the top of the sections to keep the boards aligned vertically. Of course, I was using all the jigs I had, so I plane.

Lost pics... top glued up

Unfortunately, I lost the pictures for the glue-up process. But here it is anyway.

1. Milled the lumber to 3/4" x 3" x 66".
   
2. Drilled 3, 1/2" holes in each board. 2" from each end then in the middle.
3. I only glued up 4 boards at a time using the all-thread as a makeshift clamp and some Erwin quick clamps.
4. The last group of boards I glued up 3 of the boards and then routed the dog holes on the other two. More on this later.
5. I put all the sections together using the all-thread bars and pipe clamps.

My workbench.

Here's what my workbench looked like October of 2006. I drove about 2.5 hours to get a good deal on the hard maple. I think I paid about $2.40 a bft for S2S R1S. The hard part was figuring out exactly how to start.