Project Information
I finally joined the Lumberjocks community a few weeks ago, and in my hello message I mentioned I was going to make a small bench to sit atop a Black & Decker Workmate in my loft workspace.
I've now completed it, and I'm much more pleased with it than I ought to be.
It's made of reclaimed oak floorboards. As part of the reclamation, the boards had been thicknessed, and milled to a tongue-and-groove profile. The offcuts had been thrown in a skip, and that's where I rescued them from. Each offcut was between 25 and 27 inches long, 9 inches broad including the tongue, and 7/8 inch thick.
I borrowed a bandsaw and cut away the grooves on some of them and the tongues on the others, and trimmed them to 24 inches in length. Each board was then about 8 inches across. Keeping the grain in mind I ripped two of them to 4 inches, fitted tongues into grooves, and ended up with two planks of 24×12, which I laminated together back to front (i.e. with the joins staggered). I used the other ripped boards to make legs and bracers. The legs have ledges at the feet to allow them to be clamped to the workmate. Everything is screwed together using brass screws (to avoid oak tannin stains) coated in my own beeswax, and the structure is held square with two 8mm threaded stainless steel tie rods. Overall, it measures 2ft x 1ft x 9in high, and add on about 2 3/4 inches for the thickness of the vice chops. It weighs somewhere in the region of 20lb.
I attached an apron about 6 inches across, which forms the fixed chop of the Moxon-type vice. The moveable chop is made of two boards laminated together, about 5 1/2 inches across. I bored the holes for the screw threads using an augur bit, and filed those in the moveable chop to give a bit of lateral movement to discourage racking.
Sourcing the hardware was the hardest part. When I was looking, I could find no source of the right kind of acme screw thread and handwheel here in the UK unless I was prepared to pay close on £200 pounds for an import. I decided I would have to import my own hardware, and I settled on the set from Texas Heritage Woodworks (https://www.txheritage.net/vise-hardware). It's not pretty, but it does the job in just the way I wanted it to, and - although still expensive, because of shipping, import duty and handling charge - it didn't cost the earth.
My bench-top bench is rough and ready. The oak boards had a few shakes on the underside, and the grooves were deeper than the tongues: these show on the benchtop ends. But it's a workbench, not a coffee table, and it's as solid as a rock. It will do me fine.
I've now completed it, and I'm much more pleased with it than I ought to be.
It's made of reclaimed oak floorboards. As part of the reclamation, the boards had been thicknessed, and milled to a tongue-and-groove profile. The offcuts had been thrown in a skip, and that's where I rescued them from. Each offcut was between 25 and 27 inches long, 9 inches broad including the tongue, and 7/8 inch thick.
I borrowed a bandsaw and cut away the grooves on some of them and the tongues on the others, and trimmed them to 24 inches in length. Each board was then about 8 inches across. Keeping the grain in mind I ripped two of them to 4 inches, fitted tongues into grooves, and ended up with two planks of 24×12, which I laminated together back to front (i.e. with the joins staggered). I used the other ripped boards to make legs and bracers. The legs have ledges at the feet to allow them to be clamped to the workmate. Everything is screwed together using brass screws (to avoid oak tannin stains) coated in my own beeswax, and the structure is held square with two 8mm threaded stainless steel tie rods. Overall, it measures 2ft x 1ft x 9in high, and add on about 2 3/4 inches for the thickness of the vice chops. It weighs somewhere in the region of 20lb.
I attached an apron about 6 inches across, which forms the fixed chop of the Moxon-type vice. The moveable chop is made of two boards laminated together, about 5 1/2 inches across. I bored the holes for the screw threads using an augur bit, and filed those in the moveable chop to give a bit of lateral movement to discourage racking.
Sourcing the hardware was the hardest part. When I was looking, I could find no source of the right kind of acme screw thread and handwheel here in the UK unless I was prepared to pay close on £200 pounds for an import. I decided I would have to import my own hardware, and I settled on the set from Texas Heritage Woodworks (https://www.txheritage.net/vise-hardware). It's not pretty, but it does the job in just the way I wanted it to, and - although still expensive, because of shipping, import duty and handling charge - it didn't cost the earth.
My bench-top bench is rough and ready. The oak boards had a few shakes on the underside, and the grooves were deeper than the tongues: these show on the benchtop ends. But it's a workbench, not a coffee table, and it's as solid as a rock. It will do me fine.