Craftsman's Workbench

Craftsman's Workbench 

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After many months of researching, dreaming and drawing, I finally came up with a design for my craftsman’s
workbench. While planning, I took time to consider as many workbench features as possible. Mine is smaller than a lot of showcase bench designs, but it’s well suited to my basement workshop. It’s also sturdy enough to handle most of the chores required for the size and type of woodworking I enjoy. If you’re ready for a challenging project that will help to improve everything else you build afterward, this bench is worth your time.

I do a lot of routing and belt-sanding, and for this, the end vise, bench dogs and bench surface hold much of my work in place. Still, I love traditional tasks such as hand planing, sawing and chiselling, especially when working on handcut dovetails. For these jobs, I really value the workings of a good shoulder vise. To add extra storage capacity and weight to this smaller bench, I planned for a bank of drawers over the plain stretcher boards normally used to tie the leg assemblies together. The drawers are useful and they add stability to the whole bench, making it rock solid.

The wood I chose for this project dictated the final dimensions of the bench, including some rough-sawn two-inch-thick curly maple and some 1 1/2" plain maple for the top. After sizing and hand planing the curly maple, I could only get 1 7/8" of smooth thickness out of my stock, so all of the thicker parts listed had to be made from laminated boards. Wherever I had to laminate two pieces of wood, I took care to use the showiest board face on the outside for the best visual effect. If you can find lumber thick enough to build without laminating, you’ll save hours of heavy-duty resawing, planing and gluing.

It’s a good idea to have the vises and your other bench hardware on hand so that as you build you can keep in mind just how they’ll fit in. To make this bench come together as the flat, square tool it needs to be, take extra care to make your joinery exact and check for squareness frequently. Dry-fitting parts is essential before you get out the glue bottle. Once these hefty parts are joined, you won’t be able to make adjustments. Any holes to be drilled are also easier to make and generally straighter if done with a drillpress while parts are still separate. If you chamfer and sand all edges and corners before assembly, you’ll also save time in the end.

There are four main assemblies in this craftsman’s bench: the top, the left-leg frame, the right-leg frame and the drawer unit.

In describing bench locations, I’ll call the drawer side of the bench the front, the shoulder vise is on the left, and the end vise is on the right.

This is a sample of custom made set of woodworking plans that are included already in our complete wood plans package, which also contains 15,000 more great wood plans like this. These small sample plans are intended to give our customers a preview of our large woodworking plans package before they purchase it. Please note, this particular item does not include the thousands of bonus wood plans on that package, this is for one plan only. If you want the complete package, please view it here. This is one of the plans included as part of the complete shed plans package. Perhaps if this plan is all you need, then purchase it direct, otherwise, our shed plan package is the best overall value.

Our plans are designed and written to be easy to follow and understand. This is a very simple plan with very simple instructions. You don't need an engineering degree and be able to read complex blueprints to understand our plans. You should be comfortable with woodworking and have good solid building skills, but our blueprints are still designed to be easy to read.

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