June is making work

But there's a couple problems with bench grinders, which I greatly underestimated. They throw off a lot of shit. They're loud and scary. Theres a lot of metallic waste material being thrown around everywhere. If you're using a friable grinding wheel (which you should, as you can dress the wheel to have a convex shape and give yourself more control when grinding), the wheel also throws of gritty little specks everywhere. In a confined shop space where there's a lot of tools and wood and sawdust everywhere, it's not an ideal place to also add a powered, high speed grinder into the mix. In short, it's a mess.

Now that I've finished the basic assembly of the bench, I have spent the last month or so building up the finishing touches, which was not easy. I have 2 tasks to complete before I can say the bench is done. First, I need to build a planing stop so that I have a basic way to hold boards still while I plane the faces. Second, I need to build my leg vise, which requires gluing up the laminations to make a sufficiently weighty chop, then drilling out the corresponding holes and mortises for the pin board I will be using to prevent racking when clamping material. As usual, this process took me longer that I anticipated.

When I first decided to build this bench, I was most excited to buy all the cool little doodads and widgets that I would eventually put into the bench. The first things I purchased, before even getting the wood, were 2 holdfasts, a planing stop from an American blacksmith on Etsy, and the vise screw for my leg vise. It has been well over a year since making those purchases and I am now, finally, in a place to build the parts required to actually use them. This is a recurring problem for me. I am a habitual cart-first horse-second thinker.

When using a planer, my understanding is that you aren't shooting for perfect accuracy of depth using the graduations in the machine alone. That is fine. I found that the marked gradations on the depth adjustment wheel to be pretty accurate, which is good. It means if you turn the depth knob down 1/64th an inch, you get a very light pass that a quick check with a 6" rule confirms is about 1/64" reduction in thickness. This is a very good thing.

However, having 5 sections on the wheel means that turning a full rotation gives you 5/64" change in your depth. Is this standard on planers? If so, maybe I'll commission a cheap factory to make a planer that uses 4 sections of graduation on the wheel. It's insane to me that you have to keep track of rotations in 5's.

This bench design is clearly well thought out. Even with my extremely ugly and sloppy joints, the bench pulls together at final assembly, like tension on guitar strings. As I walked around the bench, driving in the pegs into each joint, I could feel the strength and solidity in my work. When my friends flipped the bench over, it came down with a solid thud, and I leapt up and sat on it, triumphant. I had done what I previously thought was impossible. I had built a real, undeniably strong workbench.

It is overkill. I could have made something simpler, smaller, less intense. I could have just bought a nice workbench from a decent maker and been on my merry way. But I chose the difficult path, and I made it out alive and with an actual, complete bench. I was so scared it was going to explode or fall apart that I had nightmares of planing the bench and chunks falling off like pieces of cake. But yet it stands, a testament to strong joints and sweat.