Woodworking Workbench Build - The Plan

Every beginner woodworker will quickly come to realize the grave need for a solid flat platform where one would clamp, hold, chisel, saw, plane, glue and assemble all woodworking projects. Also, it would serve as storage for tools which are most often used. In this post I will kickstart the building of my workbench.

Firstly, I watched Paul Seller's bench build video series to get a base idea. The video series proved to be an excellent source of inspiration, motivation, tutorial and technique in wielding hand-tools in order to shape wood into a form which is not only useful but aesthetically pleasing. It's an awesome introduction to the world of woodworking for the beginner. After watching  other videos on Paul's Youtube channel, I had a basic understanding on the requirements of a woodworking workbench.

Next I watched an interesting workbench build by Asa Christiana and Matt Berger at startwoodworking. Interesting in the sense that I saw woodworking done using the power-tools approach. Their site has access to several project videos which demonstrates this. Of course, one would see these fabulous guys reaching for hand-tools once in a while when the need arises.

Then I continued watching even more videos on woodworking workbenches on Youtube. Note the growing appetite for more information. The words "Big Data" popped into my head right after typing that out.

Lastly, I got my hands on two of Christopher Schwarz's workbench books. These are :

• Workbenches: From Design And Theory To Construction And Use (Popular Woodworking)
•  The Workbench Design Book: The Art & Philosophy of Building Better Benches

With this acquisition I decided I had enough theory on woodworking workbenches. I had a pretty good picture on how my bench should look like in my head but somehow I had this urge to put it down on paper. I had attended a semester of technical drawing class while pursuing my engineering studies a while back so I had the experience but in this day and age, a digital image would be more useful I reckoned.

This meant I would need to learn a CAD software package. While looking for an open-source 2D CAD program for Linux I happen to stumble on SketchUp. SketchUp is an awesome yet easy to learn 3D CAD package which is available for free. The only drawback was that it ran on Windows but I would have to make an exception. I just watched the tutorial videos which were available on SketchUp's website and in no time I had completed the sketch of my workbench.

A draft sketch of my workbench.

I decided to make a really simple bench which adhered very closely to the fact that a workbench is nothing but a large surface for clamping. The draft dimensions for the top are 24" wide by 60" long by 3" thick with a height of about 35" off ground. I somehow believe the bench height used by Paul Sellers is suitable for my posture. There's an overhang of about a foot on each end. The left-hand space will be occupied by a 9" Irwin Record 52 1/2 ED woodworking vice.

This is the overall plan for the bench build. Since the bench is a work in progress, I am sure I'll be making changes as I go along.