Friday, June 27, 2014

The Never Ending New Bench

I'm still working on the new bench slab, have some help this weekend so I expect to finish the slab by Sunday. I've made a couple of design decisions, I had been leaning towards a single top but a split top won because of ease of build and I like the slot to hold tools. What I will do is make the tops asymmetrical with the front top about 340mm wide, a 80mm split, and then the back top about 190 to 200 mm wide, giving a finished bench top of about 610mm.

I expect by the time every thing gets trued and dimensioned the top will be a touch over 100mm thick and close to 2300mm long. I will move my Paramo #52 from the old bench to the new one and reinstall the leg vise on the old bench. The new bench will not have an end vise, nor will it have a sliding deadman.

I will make a bench jack for it to replace the sliding deadman. I find about 99% of end vise jobs can be done just as well with holdfasts and battens and the few jobs that need an end vise can be taken care of with a Wonder Dog. No more than I use an end vise and because most end vise jobs can be done as well using other means, I can not justify the work to install one.

BTW, the reason for the asymmetrical top and one of the reasons I'm building a new bench is on my old bench the split is right where the dog holes needed to be for the holdfasts on many jobs.  My benches keep getting simpler with every new build but my guess is this one will be paired down to the essence of a work bench....All that is needed, nothing more and nothing less.

 

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