[ Power saw whirring ] [ Mid-tempo music plays ] It's time for another episode of "The Woodsmith Shop."

On today's show, we're building a workbench.

It's the place where you going to spend most of the time in your workshop.

It's also one of the biggest tools that you actually use.

We're building an English-style bench that is full of really great features and is going to last for a long time.

I think it's time to start building.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Titebond wood glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

And by... [ Up-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Mid-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ If you've ever considered building yourself a traditional style woodworking bench, the number of designs and opinions on them can really be overwhelming.

But the design we chose for this bench is that of a traditional English-style workbench.

Now, traditionally, an English workbench would be designed to be knocked down and brought to a job site and reassembled.

However, ours is meant to be more of a permanent fixture in your shop.

There's a couple of things I like about this design.

The first is the actual construction of it.

This is a plank top, so that means there's no gluing up of lamentations and then flattening them like some other bench styles and the base goes together really quickly.

So overall, the bench construction goes pretty fast.

And even though it's a fairly small bench, there's a lot of heft here.

We built this one out of solid beech, so it's really actually quite heavy.

Another thing that I like about English-style workbenches is the number of work holding options.

Now, obviously, we have a face vise on here.

We've utilized a traditional wood screw.

It moves in and out really quickly and provides a tremendous amount of clamping force.

Along the front apron, there's a series of dog holes and those are beneficial if you're holding long pieces in the face vise, you can add support there with either hold downs or clamps or pegs.

And with the top, it's really a blank slate.

You can drill dog holes wherever you'd like to attach other workbench accessories.

Now, obviously, to build this bench, you're going to need a good set of plans.

The plans for this are available on our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

The construction of this bench starts from the ground up with the base, so I think Chris will get us started.

One of the things that makes the English workbench such a great workbench is that it's strong and rigid, and it gets a lot of that strength and rigidity through all the interlocking joinery on the base.

So, the first task in making the base is to lay out all of that joinery.

So, let's go through it all.

The first thing I have here is laid out the mortises, which will contain the aprons of the workbench.

After we cut those out at the table saw, the next task is going to be to cut these mortises for the half dovetail lap joints, for the long stretchers, and instead of the table saw, I'm going to use a router and a pattern bit for that.

Once we're done with that, there are a series of mortises to cut in each leg for the short tenons, and we're going to do that the old school way.

We're going to drill out the waste on a drill press and finish them up with a chisel.

When that's done, we've got a few holes to drill for the pins, which will secure those short stretchers.

So, we've got a lot of work to do, and we'll start at the table saw, cutting for the lap joint for the apron.

To cut these lapped half dovetail joints that join the long stretcher to our legs, I'm going to be using a pattern bit and a router.

Now, the setup here is that I have a reference piece of wood to act as a fence, and I have a couple pieces of double-sided tape underneath here to keep it from moving, and, for a little extra insurance, a clamp.

In the router, I have a pattern bit, and a pattern bit has a ball bearing on top of the cutter.

That ball bearing is going to ride in reference against this fence.

Since we need to cut a very deep lap joint here that's going to be 1 3/4-inch deep, I want to do that in several light cuts.

My first cut will only be about 3/8 of an inch.

I'll then lower the router and gets as deep as I can before the ball bearing is at the very bottom of my fence.

When I get to that point, I'm actually going to switch my reference fence over to the other side of the lap joint, repeat the same process.

I'll then waste out the interior area, and then in order to achieve the full depth of our lap, I'm going to let the ball bearing reference against the inside face that we've cut in the leg.

With the dado cut to seat our apron and the seat for the half lapped dovetail, we're ready to drill some holes in the legs.

Now, there are three different holes that we need to deal with.

The first is on the front right leg.

I've got two 3/4-inch holes, which will be for a holdfast or any of the different holed-out attachments you can use in dog holes.

On the side of the leg, there are four holes, which I'll drill with a 3/8-inch drill bit, and those will be for the drawbore pins, which will help pull the short stretchers tight.

Finally, there are the two mortises that will accept the tenon from the short stretcher.

I'm gonna use an 1 1/8-inch bit to hawk most of the waste out, and then finish up with the chisel.

Now, what's the tenons are cut on the stretchers, I may still need to do a little fitting.

That's okay.

We've got them clean, and we're ready to start with the tenons on the short stretchers.

One interesting element of the English workbench we're building is the use of drawbore pins, Now, I have two holes here that we drilled earlier, and as you can see, there's a large tenon, which goes into this mortise.

When we go to insert our dowel, the hole is actually going to be offset ever so slightly by about 1/32 of an inch so that as we drive this dowel into this hole, it is going to pull that joint even more tightly than it is.

So I have my parts clamped together temporarily here, and what I need to do now is to mark the location of the holes on the tenon.

So, I'm going to take a 3/8-inch brad-point bit, that the same one I used to draw the holes.

I'm going to place it in... and tap it a few times.

I'll do that in both locations.

Now, here are my two holes that I've just marked with the brad-point bit, but I'm not going to drill in that exact location.

Remember I said we wanted to offset the hole slightly so the joint pulls together tightly.

So, when I go to drill my holes, I'm actually going to drill the hole about 1/32nd of an inch in towards the shoulder.

Hence that when I drive this dowel in, it'll suck the joint tight.

Well, it's time to start gluing up our leg assemblies.

I'll go ahead and assemble my two short stretchers into this first leg, put the second leg on.

I'm going to clamp everything up, and after that, we're going to use the draw pins.

So this is a 3/8ths dowel.

And if you'll notice, I've tapered one end, because remember, our holes are offset.

So, I need a tapered end so that that dowel can catch that offset hole and pull things together tightly.

Well, it's time to lay out the joinery for the long stretches.

Now, in order to accurately place our half dovetail lap joints, what you need to do first is to make sure that the two leg assemblies are perfectly parallel to each other and that one is neither above or below.

So, what I've done here is, I've clamped one end to the workbench and the other, I've used a framing square as a reference off of the workbench to make sure it's running parallel to my other assembly.

Once you're sure of that, lay the long stretcher on top of the leg assemblies, and then go ahead and mark from true life where the overlap is, and that will tell us what we need to cut out.

To cut out this joint, I'm going to make my shorter cut using a table saw, but this long cut, I'm going to use the bandsaw.

And with that done, I'll do a little final fitting, and if everything goes according to plan, it will be time to glue the long stretchers to the leg assemblies and complete the base.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ One of the beauties of the design of this particular workbench is how, as each part gets added, it makes the whole thing stronger, just as you saw with Chris making the base.

Now, for my part of it, I'm going to be adding the top, and that includes adding some wide aprons on both the front and on the back side of the bench.

And I have those two aprons here.

Now, you remember earlier, Chris cut a notch on the front edge, and now I'm going to cut a dado on the inside faces of these apron pieces to fit over that notch and wrap around the legs.

Again, it's going to lock everything together.

So, in order to do that, I'm going to use a router with a pattern bit, a lot like Chris did on some of the operations, and I set up guides on each side of the cut.

Now, here's something you want to make sure you do and not go off the plan, specifically, but off your built base.

Set an apron in place on those notches and mark the location where the leg is.

You're going to get a much better fit than trying to just go strictly from the plans.

So, it's time to start making quite a bit of dust here, as I knock out these dados.

♪♪ You're going to create a lot of chips in plowing out those dados on the back side of the aprons.

Once you've got those all cleared away, there's still a little bit more work that we need to do.

The first is to cut a peak on the lower edge of the aprons, where it's going to match up with that same peak on the legs.

Now, I cut the long diagonal with a jigsaw, and then the straight shoulder with a handsaw.

Then it's just a matter of fine tuning, setting the apron in place until you get a nice, seamless fit.

Then you'll also want to use a jigsaw to cut a radius on the lower edge of the aprons, and that's just a little bit of comfort so that when you bump into the end of your bench, it's not real sharp by your thigh.

And for the back apron, all that's left now is to drill some mounting holes that you'll use for these long washer head screws and driving it into beech like this, it's always a good idea to wax those screws with some beeswax or paraffin.

Then the rear apron can get screwed in place.

Now, for the front apron, we still have a little bit more work to do.

And I've laid out a series of holes that we still need to drill.

What makes the front apron unique are the row of dog holes.

So there's going to be kind of a Z-shaped row of dog holes along the front for holdfasts and stops and supports for a workpiece.

We're also going to take care of drilling out some of the holes that will need for the face vise later on.

♪♪ ♪♪ I used a hole saw to create the hole for the vise screw, and it worked pretty well, providing that the hole saw is nice and sharp.

Now for the guide bar, I used a series of smaller bits to drill out the corners and then remove most of the waste in the middle.

To clean that up, I made a simple template that has an opening that matches the final size of the hole.

We're going to apply that with some double-sided tape here.

Now, to clean it out, I'm going to use a palm router here and a pattern bit with the bearing on the top.

♪♪ ♪♪ You know, if there's any one theme for my section of this workbench project, it's drilling a lot of holes, and that's the same when it comes to attaching the top, because not only do we have these big washer head screws that we used on the aprons, we're using them on the top, as well.

So, you need to pre-drill the counter bores and some pilot holes for those and then to get a nice tight seam along the aprons and these edge boards, I drilled and installed long wood screws to reinforce that joint, too.

Something you want to do, also, is to use a block plane or even a chamfer bit in a router to ease the edges, where all these boards meet.

The only place you'll want to avoid it for right now is along the front, and that's until we get the face vise installed.

Otherwise, it looks like it's time for the vise and for Logan to step in.

So, one of the most appealing things about English-style workbench, at least in my opinion, is the variety of work-piece holding options you have.

So, let's take a look at that front stretcher that Phil applied.

He's drilled that series of dog holes, and those are perfect for either dog clamps or holdfasts.

And really, that front stretcher is thick enough that you could clamp work pieces directly to it using just F-style clamps.

However, I find that adding a vise on one end of the bench really opens up a world of possibilities for holding your work pieces.

And Phil has really started that process here.

We're going to attach our vise using a pre-bought wood screw kit.

However, we'll talk about that in a little bit.

The first thing we need to do is take a piece of stock and make it the front jaw of our vise.

And to do that, we're gonna head over to the bandsaw.

So, the first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to rip this to width.

and then I'll throw a miter gauge on here, and I'll square up the ends and cut it to final length.

Then the final thing we have to do here at the bandsaw is simply radius those two corners, and then we'll head over to the drill press to drill a couple of holes.

♪♪ ♪♪ Okay.

So we cut the corners at the bandsaw, and I cleaned those up with the edge sander a little bit, just give us a nice smooth radius.

Then I took this back over to the bench, and I clamped it onto that front apron in the location that it's going to go.

And that allowed me to reach back through there and mark two different locations.

The first is going to be the location for the wooden screw that will pass through the jaw.

And then I also marked this location for the support arm that goes through the apron.

And this one -- once I marked that -- I had to reduce the area a little bit because the arm's going to have a shoulder on it.

So, we don't actually want to drill out and cut out this entire area.

We want to cut this about a quarter inch smaller all the way around.

So, I've laid that out, and I've equipped a 1/2-inch bit in the drill press, and that's going to match the radius that we'll put onto the tenon that's on that support arm.

So, now we have to drill that out, and we'll put the hole saw back in and cut this guy out, and then we will head back over to the bench to remove the rest of this waste.

Alright.

So when we get done at the drill press, there's just a couple things left to do on this job.

The first is to use a jigsaw to remove the waste.

And then I switched over to a chisel and a couple of files.

What we're trying to do is create parallel walls inside of this mortise.

However, if they do end up flaring out a little bit towards the outside of the jaw, that's okay.

We're going to wedge that support arm in place, and that tapering effect will really lock it in there.

Alright.

So making our support arm is pretty simple.

I have a blank glued up here that's 2 inches square, and we made sure that this fits inside the hole in the apron on the workbench.

Now we have to cut a shoulder to, basically, form a tenon on one end.

So, we'll do that here at the router table, and I'm gonna use that straight bit to make that cut, and I've set my fence so that... it's gonna define the shoulder first.

We'll make that cut all the way around, and then I'll just nibble away at the rest of the waste.

And then we're going to come back and switch that bit out for a round over bit, and we'll round over the four long edges of the support arm and also the four corners of the tenon.

Now, I'm not going to be able to go all the way to the shoulder on that tenon, but that's okay.

I'll go as far as I can, and then we can get back over to the bench, and I'll finish out that round over with a file.

So, now we can test it out, and it feels like it's gonna go in there very nice.

It might need a little persuasion, but I think it's gonna go in there well.

So, before we drive it home, we'd need to cut a kerf for our wedge that we're gonna put in there and you can do that at the bandsaw or the table saw standing on a tenoning jig.

But with a kerf like this, I'm just gonna grab a tenon saw and cut that.

Okay.

There we go.

Now, the nice thing about cutting a wedge slot like that, it doesn't have to be perfectly straight.

So, it's a little twisty, but that's alright, because we're gonna wedge it.

It's gonna spread that tenon out, and it's gonna work perfectly.

So, with that, I think we can pound this in.

So I'm gonna pound this about halfway in.

Then I'm gonna spread glue around that tenon and pound it the rest of the way.

♪♪ There you go.

Now all we have to do is drive a wedge.

Then we can work on the hardware to get it mounted.

For this bench, we opted to use a purchased wood screw kit.

Now, the wood screw is kind of traditional, but they're pretty hard to make.

So the CNC cut kit is beautiful.

It's hard maple.

This screw is nice and silky smooth.

So, I think it's going to work very nicely.

So we have the wooden screw.

We have a hard maple nut, and that fits on the end of the screw, and that will sit behind the apron.

We have a handle, and then to tie everything together, we have this bronze garter, and this bronze garter fits around the hub on that wood screw, and it gets attached to the front of the vise.

That kind of ties everything together.

So, as you loosen the screw, it pulls the jaw out.

As you tighten it down, it pushes it in.

Now, you could attach this all in this orientation with the bench standing up.

However, I think for a better view, we'll go ahead and grab a couple of sawhorses and flip this over.

So, now we have our bench upside down, I've went ahead and done a couple of things.

The first thing I did was install this guide block, and that's gonna guide the support arm as the vise works in and out and keep it from binding.

The second thing I did was, I installed that maple nut for that wooden screw.

There's a couple of things to watch out for, though.

The first thing is, the nut may need trimmed down.

So, I went ahead, cut the top off that so it fits in there nice.

The second, before you attach it, you're going to insert the vise, start threading in... the wood screw and make sure that everything's aligned and not binding.

Then that's just attached with a couple of connectors screws through the front.

So finally, the last thing we have to do is attach the wooden screw to the front jaw of the vise.

And that's done with this pair of bronze garters.

The vise itself, the vise screw itself, has a shoulder cut into it that accepts that garter.

So, position that in there.

Then it's just a simple matter of pre-drilling those locations.

Let's actually just go ahead and mark them for right now.

And then we could pull the wood screw off, pre-drill those holes, and then attach it.

Alright.

So with the final screw installed on that garter, the vise is pretty much done, and I must say, I love how that wooden screw operates.

It goes in and out pretty quickly, and it applies a lot of clamping force.

So, there is one other thing to consider with your vise and really the bench in whole, and that's finishing it.

With a wooden screw vise, you do have to pay special attention to the finishing because the finishing can make or break it from an operational standpoint.

So, the manufacturer of this screw suggests applying a penetrating oil.

Personally, I like boiled linseed oil.

And after letting that dry for a couple of days, buff it with some steel wool and apply a wax.

That can either be a chunk of paraffin wax to the threads or some paste wax.

And you'll want to apply that to the support arm, as well.

That's gonna allow everything to glide in and out nice and smooth.

Now for the actual bench itself, I also prefer to use boiled linseed oil.

It helps repel glue, gives it a nice color, but it's not a finish that's gonna chip off.

But once you do apply finish to your entire bench, or not, it's ready to be put to service in your shop.

If there's one thing that really defines woodworking, it's the image of a woodworker standing at the bench, building a project.

So, when you're building a bench for your shop, you want it to be something that's gonna help you in your work, and the bench that we built on today's episode does just that.

It's a sturdy piece of shop equipment that you'll use for years and probably pass along.

If you'd like the plans for this bench, there at our website, WoodsmithShop.com.

It's also the place where you'll find other woodworking videos on finishing and other techniques.

And once you're done there, it's probably time to join us right back here, in the Woodsmith Shop.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ If you'd like to get more video tips and techniques, sign up for the free weekly Woodsmith eTip.

Every week, you'll receive an e-mail with a video tip to get more out of your table saw, router table, and more.

Sign up at WoodsmithShop.com.

Everything in today's show comes from the newly expanded Woodsmith Guild Edition, with shop projects, plans, tips, and techniques.

To get a free preview issue of the Woodsmith Guild Edition and a free "Woodsmith" book, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

In addition, past seasons of "The Woodsmith Shop" are available on DVD.

Or you can watch them online from your computer, tablet, or mobile device.

For more information, go to WoodsmithShop.com.

Announcer: Major funding for "The Woodsmith Shop" has been provided by... Old Masters -- craftsman-quality stains and finishes since 1953.

Additional funding provided by... ♪♪ Titebond wood glues -- the pro's advantage.

And by... Kreg -- from the first cut to the final assembly, providing woodworkers with products that help to simplify woodworking challenges.

Kreg.

And by... [ Up-tempo music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪