Project Information
Hey guys! regards from Spain…
after reading one million posts about roubo benches, buy and read the master book another million, and making space in my workshop I finally decided to go ahead and build it, traditional style, drawbore pins et all.
Top wood is Danta, an african wood, hard as hell and cheaper than beech or maple here in Spain. Was a total chore to dimension it, but finally I managed to put together a big slab of 2,40 meters x 0,65 meters x 11 cm thick.
I calculated the weight of it, somewhere between 70-90 kilos.
The rest of the bench is made of yellow southern pine, and plywood for the drawers.
The leg vise is made of Danta too, with the brass hardware that you can see in the picture, homemade to fit by me. Event the brass plate with the date and my name was done by me using an electrolitic etching technique I saw somewhere in Internet.
Drawers use full extensión guides, and with them now full of hardware and tools, I cannot lift the bench not one single milimeter using all the power in my legs. Two people struggled to lift it a couple of centimeters… weigthing the drawers and body separately, put the thing close to 340 kilos (around 730 pounds?)
The most interesting feature is the self adjusting parallelism of the leg vise. It´s based on a drawing I saw somewhere too, some bicycle chain and sprokets, and homemade hardware. I think that the pictures are self explanatory, but if not, I will try to put a drawing together…
Good think is that that you can put a lot of pressure on a wide piece of wood (or thin, actually works equally well) and the system self adjusts itself so you can forget about taking care of parallelism manually with pins or scraps.
Sorry for my English, I´m doing my best, hope is good enough for you guys…
Luis S.
after reading one million posts about roubo benches, buy and read the master book another million, and making space in my workshop I finally decided to go ahead and build it, traditional style, drawbore pins et all.
Top wood is Danta, an african wood, hard as hell and cheaper than beech or maple here in Spain. Was a total chore to dimension it, but finally I managed to put together a big slab of 2,40 meters x 0,65 meters x 11 cm thick.
I calculated the weight of it, somewhere between 70-90 kilos.
The rest of the bench is made of yellow southern pine, and plywood for the drawers.
The leg vise is made of Danta too, with the brass hardware that you can see in the picture, homemade to fit by me. Event the brass plate with the date and my name was done by me using an electrolitic etching technique I saw somewhere in Internet.
Drawers use full extensión guides, and with them now full of hardware and tools, I cannot lift the bench not one single milimeter using all the power in my legs. Two people struggled to lift it a couple of centimeters… weigthing the drawers and body separately, put the thing close to 340 kilos (around 730 pounds?)
The most interesting feature is the self adjusting parallelism of the leg vise. It´s based on a drawing I saw somewhere too, some bicycle chain and sprokets, and homemade hardware. I think that the pictures are self explanatory, but if not, I will try to put a drawing together…
Good think is that that you can put a lot of pressure on a wide piece of wood (or thin, actually works equally well) and the system self adjusts itself so you can forget about taking care of parallelism manually with pins or scraps.
Sorry for my English, I´m doing my best, hope is good enough for you guys…
Luis S.
