The 3 years of stalling suggests that this was a bad plan. I’m looking to either get more confidence in this going forward or figure out what to tweak on it in sketchup. Please comment below with any design suggestions.

On the design - this design is inspired by the works of Michael Colca and Darrell Peart, whose designs are variations on Greene and Greene.  The curved bottom greatly complicates things but it’s the part I most wanted to incorporate.  My initial build is in beech as I figure things out, if it works I might redo it in other woods.

Please let me know what you think, whether a specific suggestion or just any part that bothers you.  Every comment will help give this design some momentum in my shop.

Just wanted to add a second view - here it is with the top removed and the drawers pulled out to show the skeleton.

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The only problem I have is that it tips backwards. As I push the sliding tables forward, the sawblade resists that movement. As the tables get to the back half of the table, I’m still pushing but more of the force turns into rocking the table back instead of keeping the tables moving.

I either need a lot more weight towards the front of the table, or the back legs need to be further behind the saw to keep it from rocking. I’m trying to figure out if the suggestion to raise the back 3″ would help with this issue.

For anyone really curious about what the end table is - my dad made that a few years ago. The open slats, carpeted interior, and the hole in the middle level make it nice for cats. It affords them a good view of their domain while protecting them on nearly all sides.

After looking through my assembly photos, most of them were blurry (some combination of using an iPhone for photos and maybe not stopping long for good pictures).  Below is my first dovetail with it - the gap in the upper cut is my error - I cut the wrong way the first time, and that made me lose my pencil mark.

The Workbench Project

This is a typically called a “european style” or “german style’ bench. It’s the style associated with Frank Klausz. I had seen Frank’s bench when he came through Austin a few years ago with a wood show. There’s several aspects I like about this style, which I’ll get into later. When my friend and I decided to each make a bench, he had the plans in an article from Woodworker’s Journal.
Here’s some resources I used in the making of this bench:

• “A Traditional European Workbench” by Frank Klausz, Woodworker’s Journal Oct. 2004
• “Workbenches: from Design and Theory to Construction and Use” by Christopher Schwarz (and his blog)
• “Building a Traditional Workbench” - a 60-page online article by Keith Rucker
• All of the various workbench threads that start up in the hand tools forum at woodnet.net

The measurements I used were heavily based off the Frank Klausz article, but I’ll point out the various design changes I made to that plan. It’s a good plan, I found a few dimensions were off. The Keith Rucker article helped a lot on this, even though he uses a a different front vise, the tail vise design is the same. Keith’s article also gave more detailed measurements and a detailed description of all of the processes he used.

Anyone who has read Schwarz’s book probably recognized his influence in the first picture. Yes, I used a lot of southern yellow pine in this bench. I was pretty much sold on the idea after I walked into a Home Depot, looked at the prices of 2×10 boards and figured out that SYP cost about $0.40/board-foot. I used about 110 board feet of pine in this bench, which made the bulk of the top and the legs.

Since I chose an inexpensive wood, I could simplify things and make the top a solid 4″ slab. The Klausz design uses 2.5″ boards for most of the top (which are really hard to find anyway), so my bench has an extra 1.5″ of wood compared to the plans, and the weight that comes with it. This also eliminated a couple of the rails that had to be attached to the underside of the top.

Another change I made from the plans was the back tool tray is removable, which was a tip from Schwarz’s book. The tool tray and the underneath storage were removed for all of the pictures I took. The idea is that if I need to clamp anything near the back of the bench, the tray can be removed to create another clamping option. Holdfasts can also serve this purpose - I have 2 that I bought from Tools for Working Wood, but haven’t drilled the holes for them yet.

I put in a track for a sliding deadman. I haven’t built it yet, but it was recommended in so many places that I decided I wanted it. It’s easier to put the track into the underside of the top before flipping it and adding everything onto the sides and back.

I already talked about the pine. The other woods I used in this bench are mesquite and walnut. I had some mesquite from a woodpile where it had been out in the weather for too long. It was a lot of work recovering the good parts, but that gave me some 12/4 and 16/4 stock. I had to add in a few other pieces to have enough for the bench. I had the walnut already, and it provides some contrast to show off the dovetails.

The Front Vise

This design of the front vise is unique to the european style benches. I like this design because there aren’t any vise screws between the 2 clamping surfaces. Other styles of front vises limit the depth of what you can clamp unless you can fit it between the 2 screws, this doesn’t have that limitation. However, this design does require a heavy arm in front of the bench and putting a threaded rod through all of the pieces.

Another thing I like about the vise arm is that the bottom leg extends out underneath it, which adds more stability.

The Tail Vise

There’s a lot of tail vises out there. I really like this design but could only explain it by showing what it looks like underneath the bench. If you look underneath, there’s 3 rails supporting it. The furthest back rail is attached to the vise, so all 4 pieces are interlocked and it makes the whole structure absolutely solid. Other designs don’t have any support for the front corner. In addition to these 3 rails, the top board of the vise rides on a shoulder in the endcap, which provides additional support.

With all of these support points, this vise doesn’t use the typical tail vise hardware that has a sliding plate, it only needs a simple screw and nut, which cuts about $80 off the cost.

The drawback to this vise design is it’s complexity. The 3 rails have to be parallel to each other, to the front of the bench, and to the vise screw. If any of those things are out of line, then the vise will bind. I was constantly dry-fitting and measuring to get this right.

Thats all for now, I’ll collect a lot of the in-progress shots taken on my iPhone to this (or maybe a separate article) later.

The bench top materials. I started with 2×10 boards 10′ long from Home Depot. I cut them to 6.5 feet and ripped them. I set them up in the shop to acclimate and dry out a bit more and let them for several weeks. These actually started out rather dry, but I used the moisture meter to confirm this. Getting dry wood is never a guarantee with wood from the home stores - it’s probably not kiln-dried and stored with as much care as the more expensive hardwoods.

After drying and jointed these, I ended up with about 1 3/8″ of usable width from each board, but a few did twist and I only got 1″ (out of the original 1 3/4″). These got glued up into groups of 3, I was concerned about having enough clamping pressure if I glued too many layers together. After letting these groups dry for a few weeks, I jointed them again (now about 4″x4″ posts). The part of the bench where the tail vise goes is expected to the 2.5″ thick, so I cut those notches on the bandsaw and glued up sections for most of the top. At this point, I had a 13″ wide top, which is much bigger than my jointer can handle. A common way to flatten the top is with a handplane, but my handplane skills are still pretty suspect. Fortunatly, I have a friend (furnituremaker Michael Colca, in the picture) with a 16″ jointer.

The last picture was taken a lot later in the project, you’ll notice the front section isn’t attached in some of the other pictures in this post. The final step is to glue the front sections onto the rest of the bench. After this was done, I did use a handplane to flatten the bench, but with all of the intermediate flattening on the jointers, there was very little work to do by hand.

This is some of the mesquite that I used for the bench. I was salvaging these from a woodpile that had been sitting outside for a long time. It had several bad sections that I could tear out with my hand. My original idea was to use this for the legs, and this was a rough cut of all of the leg parts, and was only about half of the wood from the original boards. After letting these sit, I found that half of these boards were too bad to work with, and couldn’t count on the base being stable. The good parts from these boards made the front vise arm and one of the end caps.

This is a test block for the dog holes that go into the front of the bench. The bench dog (sitting on top of it) drops down into the holes, and sticks up in order to hold flat work against the bench. I wanted a shoulder in the hole, in order to prevent the bench dog from falling all of the way through the dog hole. So I used a router jig to make these holes. The left side of the router jig is for the holes in the benchtop, the right side is for the holes in the tail vise. The main difference is a 2 degree lean to the hole. This lean helps pull the work to the bench as it’s being tightened between the bench dogs.

This is a dry fit of the base. It’s a lot of mortise and tenon joinery, and a lot of fitting to make it tight.

This was the start of the dovetails for my tail vise. I have a Lie-Nielsen tenon saw, and this was taken at the point when I realized that it didn’t quite go deep enough before I was riding against the brass back. I had to finish these cuts with a japanese style rip saw, which is the only handsaw I had without a back.

Here’s the 3 pieces being dry fit. The picture above shows me sawing the through dovetail on the right; the left side is a half-blind dovetail which is more difficult to do because the saw only cuts about half of the sides and the rest has to be done with chisels. Cutting and carefully fitting both dovetails took the better part of a weekend.

This is a dry fit of the tail vise against the end cap and the front. Everything has to line up correctly or the vise won’t move. I’m glad I did this, because I found an incorrect measurement in the plans (as far as I can tell, maybe I had something else wrong). The sides were 4 1/4″ tall, as far as I can tell they needed to be 4″. There’s a 7/8″ thick board added to the top of the tail vise, my only solution at this point was to change that to 5/8″.

Getting back to the workbench base. I had done all of the mortise and tenon joinery before, but now I had to install the bolt hardware into the long stretchers. In each of the legs, I had to drill a 1/2″ hole from the bottom of the mortise to the outside of the leg (and countersink the bolt with 1 1/2″ bit). Then I assembled the leg and stretcher and drilled back through the hole into the end of the stretcher. You can see how the bolt hole splits the tenon in the picture above. Finally I had to route a mortise so a washer and nut can be put on the end of the bolt. I used a simple rectangular cutout pictured above and a spiral cut bit (without the bolt in the way, of course).

Another big dovetail to do. This one I did on the bandsaw and tilted the table - it didn’t turn out as well as the hand-cut ones. It still took a lot of fitting to get it right. One thing I noticed here is that the front vise arm of the new bench is bigger than my old bench.

The front arm needs a large nut installed for the vise. The first step is to drill a 1 3/4″ hole deep enough for the nut, then 1 1/4″ the rest of the way through. Putting the large hole all the way through wouldn’t look right. After that, I marked and cut a mortise about 3/8″ deep for the square flange on the nut. I used just a 1/2″ chisel and my router plane to do this. Another way to do this would have been use a router to chew out most of the waste and follow up with a chisel to the edges. Both would work, but I had a new router plane to play with.

This is one of the dry-fits I did along the way. For fitting the front vise (and the tail vise also), I found it helpful to turn the benchtop upright so I didn’t have to fight gravity as much with the heavy pieces. The Klausz article show the fitting upside-down on a large assembly table, but I don’t have any tables big enough to hold the benchtop for fitting.

After all of the vises are fitted, I can finally measure and cut the end caps to the correct length. Then comes 2 more sets of half-blind dovetails, one at each end of the back of the tool tray. The end caps actually bolt into the bench, I didn’t bolt these on with full tension before measuring the tool tray back, so I had to trim the back piece after I had already put the dovetails into it.

This is the 3 main components of the front vise arm being glued up. This part gets bolted on to rest of the bench through a bolt on the side and a long threaded rod that goes from the front arm to the back of the bench.

Back to the tail vise.  The first picture in this set is yet another dry fitting, but this is the first one that involved the threaded screw and nut.  Having that work is a big relief and made all of the other fitting I did worth it.

Now it’s time to install the top plates onto the tail vise.  The front part overhangs the inside and covers up the area with the screw.  I lined the inside edges up perfectly, and let it overhang the outside, which I planed off later.  Once I got the top plates fitted and mitered, I marked the locations of the dog holes and drilled a rough hole through.  After glue-up, I used some floats and files to clean up the holes.

Last picture from my iPhone.  The bench has been finished with one coat of Tried and True varnish/oil, brought inside, and assembled.  Better pictures are available in my main workbench post.

I saw a 2-page profile of a master puzzlemaker in Wood Magazine. In that article, there was a picture of one of the puzzles he makes named “Torture”, and it’s 6 pieces. I love a challenge and love wooden puzzles, so I just had to try to make it.

The article had a picture like this one, 6 pieces. from the way they interlock, the width of the piece has to fit inside the long slots in the piece. Since the piece is 5 units wide (3 oak and 2 walnut blocks), the length of them must be 7. So I had the design figured out, the next problem is how to make the pieces.

The way I ended up doing it was using 3 full-length sticks of oak and 4 walnut blocks, then I’d cut the oak to each piece’s shape. Since trimming the walnut back would be very difficult, I made a jig to take up the 2 slots during the glueup, letting me align the inside ends of the walnut blocks. After the glue was dry, I trimmed both ends, cut out the oak inside, and did a lot of sanding.

Since the thickness is exactly the same as the slots, the front and back had to be sanded to allow some clearance. I also rounded the corners and sanding down the edges so that each piece would pass through the others.

Next came figuring out how to assemble it. About this time the thought occured to me - I hope they showed all 6 unique pieces in the article and didn’t have a duplicate. Fortunately, it was all 6 pieces, but after trying for a bit, I went to my computer and googled “torture puzzle” and eventually found a picture of the solution on a japanese website. Some of the moves are difficult even when you know what needs to move. Here is a picture partway in the assembly.

This won 2nd place in beginner accessories in the 2004 Central Texas Wood Artisan’s Show.

This is the first major furniture project I made. The base is based off an oval-shaped coffeee table I saw in the book “Modern Furniture Projects”. I increased the height, changed it to a circular table, and designed a matching top.

It’s made from quilted white oak with a golden oak stain and varnished.

The outer ring was assembled by quarters, then halves, then glued together around the floating center panel. The center panel is bookmatched quartersawn white oak, with a nice fleck pattern. All of the rounding on the table edge and down the legs was done with a 1/2×1 table edge router bit.

It has one minor flaw - with the legs that close to the center and being that small, it’s easy to twist the table an inch or so to the side, and then it’ll spring back a bit. I’ve seen 4-legged tables with legs near the edges and pedestal tables with a large support in the middle but haven’t seen any 4-legged tables with legs near the center like this - I think I’ve found out why…

I was the one that set it up, honestly I didn’t know what to expect. He gave me a lot to think about, which I might post on in separate entry. If you ever get a chance to hear him talk on design, go see it. He talked about focusing on the “what” and not on the “how”. He has an infectious love of design, which shows in the his company’s tools - aestetically pleasing in addition to being highly functional.

If you have really sharp eyes (or if I used a better camera), you might see Deneb Puchalski from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks in the background. He vastly improved my handplane skills with just a 7 minute demo of how to setup a handplane before John’s presentation. If that ratio holds true, I’ll be a pro after I spend a few hours in his presence this weekend.