If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out the Lost Art Press teaser on Roman Workbenches.  There is something about the bench depicted in the plate that makes sense to me.  At the height of a normal workbench, I bet it would be fantastic for a small-space woodworker and pull excellent double duty as workbench and stout kitchen table.  To that end, I have decided to forego the long stretchers and shelf on my Roubo-style workbench.

It’s been at this stage for a while, actually.

Here is my thinking: the benchtop is just over 4″ thick,  and the tenons are at least 4″ wide and 1 1/4″ thick, so the joinery is plenty beefy.  Instead of long stretchers and a shelf, I will build a low, rolling cart to keep under the bench.  When in use, I can wheel out the rolling cart (for access to my tool chest and other essentials), and when I’m done, it tucks away neatly.  This will free up the corner where my tool chest currently resides and, eventually, I can revisit the floor chest idea.

The bench will still have short stretchers, although I might use lapped joinery temporarily (rather than mortise and tenon) until I determine if the bench can live without long stretchers.

Make sense?  Or am I just being lazy?

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No, not really.  But the chamfer on the lower skirt isn’t as deep as I wanted.  And “Tuscan Red” milk paint is drabber than I expected.

First coat, slathered on.

I should have carefully masked the insides, but whatever, it’s a tool box.  Also, the reinforcing corner brackets seem to be growing…

Second coat, much more uniform.

Third coat should be the charm.  Then I’ll worry about the tray and the lid.

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In a classic case of “trying to do way too much all at the same time”, I dropped the traveling tool tote on Sunday and fractured front right joint.  Id est, the most visible joint. I was trying to attach the rot strips while the clamps were still on the tray runners and it lost balance on the saw benches.

Everything was going so well, at the time.

Whatever stress imparted upon impact, the top nail no longer held the joint solidly and I feared for long term stability.  My choice was clear: add a dovetailed skirt and dust seal to the project, or cram the joint full of some more hide glue and reinforce everything with some ugly Home Center corner brackets.

Seriously, guys, what did you think I’d go with?

Repeat after me: this is a working tool, not a museum piece.  At least the handles look nice (or will, once I blacken the screws).

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I fully intended to add the skirt to the tool tote before nailing on the ship-lapped floorboards.  I really did.  The case went together square, so the floorboards weren’t needed to pull everything into alignment.

But because the case is rabbeted and nailed together, I wanted a low profile skirt to sit below the cut nails.  Unfortunately, with the floorboards being over 5/8″ thick, there is just barely half of the 1×2 skirt in contact with the case itself.  Not nearly stable enough to glue on first.  Oh well.

Pretty board

It’s not all bad news, though.  Because the thickness of the floorboards is approximately half the height of the skirt, it should be really easy to clamp down the skirt and eliminate any gaps when it does go on.  Even if I have to make a go-bar.

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Using a router and a straightedge clamp to square the ends of the core slab went better than anticipated.  With some fussing, the straight bit worked like a charm, giving me a crisp step down to run the bearing on the pattern bit against.  There wasn’t even any chipping on either first pass with the straight bit.

Quite a bit of fussing, actually.

Unfortunately, the pattern bit didn’t work as well and I did get some blowout on the second passes.  Nothing terrible, but I was kicking myself for not first scribing the ends (to sever the fibers and prevent chipping).  No harm, no foul, though, because I still had to plane the front face square to the underside.  All in all, I’m very pleased with the final length of 71 7/8″, which will be further augmented by the inner and outer jaws of a quick release tail vise.

Not bad, starting from twelve foot 2×10’s.

The core slab, now S3S with only the top to go, is approximately 4 1/16″ thick.  Assuming the slab doesn’t move any further (it cupped very slightly in the week after initial thicknessing), I doubt it will take more than 1/16″ to flatten the top.  At any rate, anything over 3 1/4″ validates my choice to use 2×10’s instead of straight 2×4’s.

I’ve already created the mortises on the back edge, and I’ll be creating the front mortises over the Eastern weekend.

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The first set of mortise strips went onto the core slab without a hitch (almost).  I’m very pleased with the result, but I’m glad I did the back mortises first.  When I get to the front mortises, I’ll have perfected my technique.

I don’t think this was faster than boring and paring, but it is certainly crisper.

After all the flattening, squaring and gluing (which I promise to write more about later), I’m sick of the workbench build.  Instead, I’ll distract myself for a couple weeks with a traveling tool tote, based heavily on Christopher Schwarz’ boarded tool chest from 2015, but scaled down.  I outgrew my soft tool tote long ago.  It’s time I upgraded my traveling setup.

I like this boarded tool chest design because it’s rabbeted and nailed, rather than dovetailed.  Dovetails are great, but this is a working piece that I want to complete on a decent timeline.  And call me crazy, but I really enjoy splitting rabbets (my shop-made fillister plane is only 5/8″, after all).  I will likely follow the oak-battened lid design of the source material, also for no other reason than it’s easier than a full dust seal of a traditional floor chest (but also because this tool tote won’t be populated full-time).  The entire carcass, including the ship-lapped floor, is only seven boards.

Two sides, two ends, three floor boards, all cut to rough length.

Made almost exclusively from 1×12 common pine from the home center, the inside dimensions of the tool tote will be slightly over 26″ long x 12″ wide x 11″ high. There will be plenty of room in the floor plan for a panel saw, two back saws, a jointer plane, a smoothing plane and a router plane, plus a chisel rack on the inside wall.  A single sliding tray on oak runners will hold everything else I need for on-site work.

One final note: it’s amazing what you can find when you dig through the stacks of common pine.  In addition to a nearly knot-free carcass, there is enough clear, quarter-sawn wood to laminate a stable lid.  Plus, the quarter-sawn off-cuts from the floor boards will become the walls of the sliding tray.  All of this from only twenty-four feet of home center common pine.

I feel energized.

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I had hoped to quickly and easily square the ends of the new workbench’s core slab with my compound miter saw.  Unfortunately, the slab is too heavy for the extending arm on the base and no amount of clamping pressure could keep it steady and square.  As a fallback option, I will use a straightedge clamp and a full size router.  A 3″ straight bit should hog off most of the waste, with a pattern bit to finish the job on the flip side.  My little trim router may have the torque, but it definitely doesn’t have the collet, so my full size router and D-handle base are coming out of retirement for one last job.

Once the core slab is squared off, I can begin applying the boards that will form the mortises.  Each mortise strip is comprised of three boards: two ends at 12″ long each, and one center board, sized to fit.

Seen here, surfaced but not yet cut to final length.

Each mortise strip board will be pre-sized and glued directly to the core slab, using the underside of the core slab as the reference surface and the tenon boards for each of the four laminations as spacers.  As a result, the front and back faces of the core slab must be absolutely square to the underside of the core slab.  The slab has probably moved since initial flattening last weekend, so the last thing before glue-up will be re-dressing the underside and faces.  And I still have to surface those tenon boards

The mortises are completed by adding another, full-length, board to each face of the bench top.  Then, on the front face only, a second full-length board, picked for its beauty, will complete the bench top and be the show face of the bench top.  This added depth also keeps the dog holes out of the mortise strip.

Finally, each front leg will be brought co-planar with the show face of the bench top by similarly adding show boards.  Having not thought it completely through yet, I would nonetheless imagine the show-faces of the legs will be sized and added after assembly and settling.

If I do it all correctly, only the topside of the bench top will require any further dressing.  IF.

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