Reddit reviews The Workbench Design Book: The Art & Philosophy of Building Better Benches
We found 5 Reddit comments about The Workbench Design Book: The Art & Philosophy of Building Better Benches. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Thanks for this info! I did some searching and found some more woodworking books. You can borrow up to 10 books at a time! All of these are free to borrow for Prime members!
(https://www.amazon.com/Hybrid-Woodworking-Blending-Quality-Furniture-ebook/dp/B00HV0VNJY?_encoding=UTF8&redirect=true&ref_=ku_mi_rw_edp)
Mike Siemsen has a DVD out called The Naked Woodworking that addresses starting with nothing and building out a Nicholson style bench. It's doable in a weekend (ish).
He also built a knockdown version
It all comes down to what you want to do as well. There's nothing wrong with buying a bench, though I've never met a Sjoberg bench I've liked.
If you are willing to put the time into building one, you'll be able to build the perfect bench for your needs, I'd pick up Chris Schwarz's second bench book. Actually I'd recommend that either way as it will give you a better understanding of what a bench should do for you.
Read these two books:
Then make up your mind.
Most of the good benches have a lot in common. Thick, heavy tops. Total weight exceeding 300lbs. Legs like tree-trunks. A vise on the front and on the end. Legs and stretchers in plane with the front of the bench.
After that, there are a lot of personal choices to be made like vises, deadman or no, split tops, tool trays, shelves, tool storage at the rear, square vs round dog-holes, etc. In reality, this stuff barely matters once you get the core details right.
My bench-in-progress is basically a longer (7'), narrower (22") version of Schwarz's personal Holtzapffel, except with a Veritas twin screw. If I ever get bored of the twin screw, retrofitting a leg vise is a simple matter, and then I will have something more closely resembling a Roubo, albeit with a quick-release vise on the end. If I get bored of that, I can always replace it with a tail or wagon vise. At the same time, this style of bench will get me up and running faster than I would have been with a Roubo, which is a good bit more work to build.
I chose Southern Pine at the advice of Christopher Schwarz's book "Workbenches: from Design & Theory to Construction and Use" (amazon), which is an immensely useful text for anyone looking to build their own bench.
Southern Pine has a relatively straight grain and it's rather dense for a softwood (modulus of elasticity is 1.93, compared to Hickory at 2.16 and Doug Fir at 1.95). It can tend to be a little knotty, so buying 2x8 or wider and resawing has big advantages.
Schwarz also wrote "The Workbench Design Book: The Art & Philosophy of Building Better Benches" (amazon), which has designs and plans for several distinct styles of bench.
For anyone thinking to build their own workbench (especially people who are new to furniture building), I highly recommend getting both books. They complement each other quite well with tips and feature descriptions all the way to plans and cut lists. One of the more useful parts of the first book (for me anyway) is the chapter on matching features to functions. Even a novice can build a bench they know will have useful features for the type of work they want to use it for.
That sounds like it was a lot of fun and learned a few things or two. I have watch the English Wood workers videos on plane making but I didn't think to check out to see if he had anything on work benchs. mostly I have been looking at Christopher Swartz's book on workbenches.