What Comes First ?

• The Bench……or The mess on it ?

What tools or workshop structure are of the highest importance in any new workshop.

And those questions should also include ; according to whom ?

Iv’e watched an awful lot of Adam Savage on Youtube but iv’e recently switched watching allegiance to woodworking Youtuber Rex Kreuger who talks, strangely enough, about hand tools based woodwork as that’s what i’m probably heading towards with my new workshop. Today, by the way, I took delivery of a posh set of brad point drill bits and a heavy screw – i’ll come back to that in a while. Both Savage and Kreuger are makers : Savage a generalist courtesy of the film industry and Kreuger a guy who enjoys messing around with wood, showing us how to do things in that material and selling us the plans to help us do it for ourselves.

When asked the question ; what comes first, our man Savage said lots of power and lots of light but then added – as long a bench space as your working space can accommodate. Rex Kreuger says that the very first thing that a budding woodworker needs is a stable and secure surface to work on and if that’s not an actual bench then the first thing that he, she or it needs to make is a bench to work on. Well, I kinda/sorta do have a bench already except that it’s a great example of Savage’s first law : that any empty horizontal surface will soon get covered with stuff. I figured power and light to be the main things that Sparky Mark had to do when he rebuilt the workshop electrics. I now have as many accessible power points as an ICU bed space and as much available light but it’s down to me to do something about the bench.

Yes ; it’s a table but it will soon be masquerading as a workbench – nice floor though but.

I have to admit to a lot of to and fro on the question of benches in the workshop. I thought for a long time that I would build a pretty standard workbench orientated towards woodwork although by the time the floor was done and we were putting a roof on i’d gone more towards the idea of having a long machinery bench and a large central work ‘island’ – like an island style kitchen except for crafting and model making. What iv’e actually done is to combine a bench and work table into one piece and what I started with was a large rustic farmhouse style table made from heavy timber : the top was so heavy that even between us we struggled to carry it so that part has been discarded and it now has most of a sheet of 25mm plywood as it’s top, more plywood (2 x 18 mm) as an apron and as heavy a leg vice as I could build – below.

(Abobe) – in view is the chop of the leg vice and just out of view is the fulcrum wedge that makes the whole thing work : for sure, the vice doesn’t have a handle yet but one is on order. The apron is a lamination of 2 lengths of 18mm plywood and is about to get multiple holes for pegs to support long pieces against the edge of the worktop. I spent most of the day boring through the square section top piece of one 6′ x 6′ leg to take the vice screw which is a chunky length of steel. The worktop is going to get several planing stops and/or holes for bench dogs although the main idea is to keep the top surface entirely free to act as a work table.

The long machinery bench is in and so far it has a very large vice, my bench grinder and a new pillar drill at one end as that’s the first significant tool purchase I made after securing the former dining table and having it shipped to Cornwall. I’m glad to say that the workshop still looks clean and bare – almost minimal – as a lot of my ideas for it’s layout are a bit Shaker inspired. Just in view, below, is my old tool chest – the one I converted last year – which is slowly getting emptied out as more and more of the tools that I actually use are added to the storage dresser above the machinery bench.

The first planned project, now that I have a large central workbench is a Dutch style carpenters chest to replace my one time seaman artificers chest which I intend to build specifically for better woodworking tools – most of mine being DIY kind of tools. Iv’e acquired the first specific tool for that ; a long vintage wooden jack plane which I intend to convert into a scrub plane. Below is a quick view of the converted dresser which is serving as my functioning tool storage for everyday stuff.