Workbench upgrade

February 19, 2013 Adam Goerdt

I decided it was time to upgrade my workbench. Below are some of the photos I took to document the process.

This is the workbench which came with the house that I've been using for the past two years. This bench had seen better days

And large gaps between the tabletop boards Here it is after the old top and backsplash were removed After dismantling the bench I found that I also inherited some shingles And that the old owner was too lazy to move the shingles out of the way when they painted the floor Here are the salvagable pieces from the old bench. I was able to re-use some of it Here I'm working on building the new bench frame out of 2x4s. Oops The front and back frames are complete. They're held together with steel plates and pocket screws. The legs are salvaged from the old bench Frames flipped upside down for attachment of the top rails. Bottom rails are going on now Flipped back right-side-up with two more top rails to support the new tabletop New tabletop base is on and bottom rails added to support the bottom shelf. The tabletop base is made from 4 2x10s cut 6' long Shelf is in. Took a little bit of creative shaving to get it to fit, but it's snug. Now I have a place to store my hand tools! Here are the screws holding the table top down. They're drilled about 2/3 of the way though the 2x10. The idea was that the screw would act as a clamp to flatten out some of the warp. It helped a little, but in it's current form the table was nowhere near flat. Another reason that the screws were sunk so low was that I knew I was going to have to plane the 2x10s down to provide a flat base for the MDF surface. In order to plane the new top I built a router planing sled Planing sled components cut to size and dadoed Assembled I needed to wait for a flat-bottom router bit to arrive, so I made drawers in the mean time. These are the cut components for the three drawers Drawer! Flat bottom bit arrived. Not bad I used some leftover MDF from the table surface act as sacrificial guides and provide a parallel surface for the sled to ride. The drawers have also been installed It was dusty. Really dusty. I needed to take two passes with the sled to remove the warp. The amount of dust from the two planing passes completely filled my 16 gallon shop vac. At the worst point I ended up taking about 1/4" of material from the 2x10s Tabletop base after the first pass with the planer sled. It left more tool marks than I expected. I used the sacrificial guide to check the flatness of the tabletop base after the second pass and was happy with the results. You can still see the tool marks from the router. I took a couple of passes with the belt sander to smooth it out, but wasn't too worried about the ridges I layed the 2 sheets of 3/4" MDF layed on top of the base and framed with 3" poplar to keep it in place. The table is completely flat and starting to get some use The final touch is a poplar face for the draws cut from leftovers, and vintage 80's drawer pulls salvaged from some previous kitchen work