To Build a Workbench: Part I

As I mentioned in my recent post about celebrating our one-year anniversary in the house, I’m currently working on turning one corner of the basement into my new workshop. And no workshop is complete without a super awesome workbench.

You might be wondering who that awesome person standing next to the awesome workbench is. That’s my carpenter, and he designed this bench, built it in pieces, brought it down from Vermont to Boston in a pickup truck, and then we assembled it together in my basement. I asked him if I could share his name on the blog, and he asked to be known just as “Sage’s Dad.” He also has a day job as a college professor, as if talented woodworker and coolest dad ever weren’t enough to keep him busy.

For those of you who want to construct your very own incredibly sturdy and functional workbench and don’t have an awesome carpenter/dad like I do — or you just want to read me brag about mine — I have a few posts lined up. Today we’ll cover designing and constructing the pieces, next week the assembly process, and the following week I’ll hopefully be all set to show you some finishing touches I’m putting on the workbench plus all the other changes I’m making to the space to turn it into a fully functional workshop that inspires me to keep tackling new and challenging projects.

It didn’t really seem right to post about the design and building process, though — my dad deserves 100% of the credit for all the work. And so I’m super excited to announce that today we have our first guest post on Plaster & Disaster! I’ll be jumping in a few times throughout to share some of my own thoughts, but mostly we’ll get to hear in his own words how he conceived of this simple and yet incredibly clever design despite all the challenges I kept throwing his way. So without further ado, let me hand over the reins!

Guest Blogger

“Sage’s Dad”

“One of the most important lessons taught in Dad School (that important rite that all new expecting dads need to graduate from before assuming the mantle of fatherhood) is Lesson 26. This is the lesson that states: “When your daughter asks you to help her build a workbench for the basement of her newly acquired home, you do it.” I admit, I thought that lesson was a little weird at the time, but now … 29 years later … it all makes sense to me.

So last winter, Sage asked me to help her build a workbench. And following Lesson 26, I jumped to it. Since her role as a DIY maven potentially requires her to work with all manner of tools on all manner of projects, I knew that I needed to design a bench that was sturdy and big enough to handle big projects.

On a visit last March, we scoped out possible locations in her basement, and we quickly decided that the best spot was up against a wall that already had an installed baseboard heater.

This argued for first removing the heater, but I’m firmly in the home remodeling camp that removes things like heaters only as a last resort, so I decided that it would be better to design a workbench that takes the heater into account.

A final catch in all of this is that Sage lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and I don’t. I live about four hours northwest of her in the Champlain Valley of western Vermont. While it would have been possible to build the bench from scratch right at her home, I knew that it would take a few days to cut, shape, and fit all of the pieces into the finished whole, days that I didn’t have. So I needed to design a workbench that had components that I could make and partially assemble in my Vermont workshop and then transport to Boston for final assembly.

So that became the challenge: design and build a large, sturdy, modular, and transportable workbench for an idiosyncratic space. Hey, how hard could it be?

Here’s how we did it.

I designed the workbench as two connected pieces: the bench itself and the tool rack attached to the back of the bench.

A bench is basically a flat surface sitting on legs and constructed so that it doesn’t rack, or wobble, from side to side.

I chose 5/8” CDX plywood with a good face as the flat surface (ie bench top). The baseboard heater that I needed to plan around has two pipes 104” apart that feed it from the ceiling. Since plywood sheets are typically 48 x 96”, I didn’t have to cut its length down and would have only 3” of space between the bench and pipes on each side.

As for determining the width of the frame, I’ll get to that later in the post. Hint: it involves some flashbacks to high school math.

In the meantime, let’s jump ahead to having cut the plywood to the correct width, at which point I attached it to a frame of 2×6 spruce dimensional lumber.

I chose this over 2×4’s in part because I felt the 2×6’s would provide additional clamping space for any mounted tools Sage wanted to add, such as a bench vise. Also, I just happened to have some 10-footer 2×6’s left over from a different project, and I wanted to put them to use.

All attachments in this project were star-slotted exterior screws, typically 8 gauge and sized between 1-5/8^” and 3-1/2”, depending on need.

I decided to use six legs, four in each…”

WAIT!!!! Sage here. My dad says “star-slotted exterior screws” all blase there, but you guys these things are awesome. They have a star-shaped head rather than flat or philips, and the benefit of them is that they do not strip. It’s pretty incredible. They require special star-shaped drill bits that need to be the exact size of the screw you’re using, but the drill bits that work with each screw size tend to come with the packs of screws when you buy them. They are incredible and I was totally blown away when he showed me these things in action.

Okay Dad, you may proceed.

“…I decided to use six legs, four in each corner and two centered on front and back. This would not only prevent the bench from ever sagging in the middle but it would also give me something to work with as I designed the under-bench shelves for storage. The legs needed to be strong, and it turned out that I had some rough-cut 6×6 posts also left over from another project that could do the trick.

I decided to cut them to 34”, which when placed under the CDX surface would make the surface height 34-5/8”. This is a reasonable height for a generic bench — the rule of thumb for height is the distance from the floor to the bend of a person’s wrist. While Sage might prefer a slightly shorter bench, it would likely also be used by Sam, her husband, so I compromised and made the bench slightly taller.

To avoid wobble, the legs all had to be the exact same height, so I built an extra-long and extra-tall fence on my table saw’s miter gauge to accommodate the larger posts and set a stop block at 34”.

Since the blade on my table saw only rises up to a maximum of 3”, each leg required two cuts from opposite faces to bring them to length.

Unfortunately, I only had five extra posts, so I had to construct a sixth leg out of 2×8 spruce. I cut four 34” lengths, ripped each of them to 6”, and then face glued them together into a single 6×6 post

The placement of the three front legs was easy: they were attached right up against the front edge of the 2×6 frame, mean they were inset by the width of the 2×6 (which is actually 1-1/2″, not 2″). However, the back legs needed to be mounted forward of the back edge in order to accommodate the presence of the baseboard heater yet still allow the back edge of the frame to rest flush against the wall.

The depth of the heater was 3-1/4” inch, so subtracting the 1-1/2″ for the width of the bench top frame, that meant the back legs had to be mounted 1-3/4” in front of the back edge of the frame.

So here’s where high school math comes in handy. I wanted to make both the bench top and an under-surface shelf out of a single piece of 48×96” plywood. The question became this: What are the widths of these two pieces if (A) together, plus an extra 1-1/4” allocated for the blade kerf plus trimming, they equal 48”, and (B) the under-surface shelf is 4-3/4” narrower than the surface (the width of two 2×6’s plus the 1-3/4” offset for the back legs)? Sounds like a “two equations with two unknowns” problem, don’t you think?

I made X the width of the bench top and Y the width of the shelf. Then the following are true:

X + Y + 1.25 = 48

Y = X – 4.75

Therefore …

X + (X – 4.75) + 1.25 = 48

2X = 51.5

X = 25.75

So the outside dimensions of the 2×6 frame should be 25-3/4 x 96”, and each 2×4 frame should be 21 x 37-1/2” (the length between the legs). I really think high school math should be taught as a shop class, don’t you?

I laid the plywood on top of the 2×6 frame, clamped down the outer corners, cut the overhang with a circular saw, and then cleaned up the edges with a trim router bit.

Then I attached the 2×6 frame, as discussed at the beginning of the post.

I shaped the under-surface shelves, trimming them to the correct width and notching each of them on one end so that in the middle of the bench they would fit between the legs and butt up against each other.

Lastly, to support the shelves I constructed two rectangular frames of 2×4’s that would be mounted to the legs 9-1/2” from the floor. Taking the width of the legs and the 2×6 frame into account, I found that to mount to the inside of the legs, each 2×4 frame needed to be 37-1/2” long, and 21″ wide to match the width of the plywood shelves. This photo previews the eventual assembly, but shows the rectangular frame in action:

With all the pieces for the bench completed, I had to tackle the tool rack.

I wanted it to be tall enough to accommodate a fair number of tools without being so tall it had a lot of unreachable space. I cut three pieces of 2×4’s 35-1/2” tall to be the uprights on which the tool rack would be mounted and that would rest on the back edge of the bench. The uprights were mounted onto a ½” sheet of CDX plywood (96” long, of course), two on each end and one dead center. The width of the CDX was cut so that 6” extended beyond the bottom of the uprights (41-1/2”). This would allow the tool rack to be attached to the bench by setting the tool rack onto the back of the bench, resting on the butt ends of the 2x4s and screwing the 6” plywood overhang onto the back of the bench.

I wanted the tool rack to accommodate both pegboard hooks as well as screw-mounted tool holders. Personally, I prefer custom-built tool holders, but I know they require extra effort to design and build, which is why a lot of woodworkers and DIY mavens prefer the ease of moveable hooks. So I mounted pegboard over the CDX plywood backing. Because of the center 2×4 upright, I mounted the pegboard in two separate pieces. I created a space between the pegboard and plywood (to allow for the use of pegboard hooks, which extend out the back of pegboard) by gluing strips of ¾” pine (ripped to 2-1/2”) onto the plywood (top, bottom, sides and middle)

Then I screwed the pegboard onto the pine strips through to the plywood.

To take advantage of the additional space available at the top of the tool rack, I also obtained a 96” 1×8 and 1×6 to use as a shelf and its backing, which would be easy to assemble on-site.

And with that, the pieces were fully constructed and ready for transport: the surface mounted on its frame, six legs, and two under-surface shelves with frames, the tool rack, and pieces for the top shelf.

All that remained was to load them into my pick-up truck, haul them to Boston, put all of the pieces together, and then, of course, follow Dad School Rule 27: When your daughter asks you to write a blog post, you do it! Like I said before, I thought that lesson was a little weird at the time, but …”

So what do you guys think, is my dad the best or what? Next week I’ll be back with Part II: How we assembled all these pieces into a super sturdy and flawlessly-designed workbench over the course of just a few hours. I highly recommend you return for that post, because if you’ve been following along building your own workbench (which obviously 100% of you have been) then all you have right now is a bunch of pieces. We still haven’t told you how to put them together…. And then Part III will involve a little aesthetic work I’m doing on it, because of course I just can’t help myself. Stay tuned, there’s paint and stain in the future!