I’ve been following along watching a few people build their benches as part of The Woodwhisperer Guild Build and decided to take a stab at doing my own detailed SketchUp plan for my bench. I was pleasantly surprised to find the process of building a bench in SketchUp highlighted a lot of errors in my design. I’m quite glad that I avoided finding this during the building process…but these were a rather painful lesson in using SketchUp. C’est la vie…it’s all good, I know more about SketchUp than I did before…just enough to make me dangerous without making
me competent.
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So you want to be a woodworker?
Interested in woodworking? It’s “Get Woodworking Week!” Thinking you should take the leap and start collecting…err..buying the tools you need? Here’s a little primer on getting started in woodworking and what you REALLY need to know to fit in to the woodworking world. Read the rest of this page »
The Petite 21st Century Split-Top Roubo Plus
The bench I’m planning to build is the offspring of a number of benches. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on, sometimes over and over and over…just call me slow on the uptake. This all started with WIA 2010 where I saw the different benches used in the demonstrations during lectures as well as the benches in the marketplace. I realized that I was not going to transition to a hybrid or hand tool woodworker with the bench I currently had. Since that time, I’ve seen many more benches (click here for slideshow of the benches at NEWWS last year), scoured blogs for details of workbench builds and drawn several different bench styles.
2012 is the year of the workbench
I’m not saying this just for me, look around the blogosphere and you’ll find plenty of buzz about workbenches. Chris Schwarz, ever the woodworking barometer, has moved on past workbenches but has provided a great starting place for those of us currently suffering from workbench envy and repeated cursing at our current workbench that breaks almost every rule in the book…or books as it were. Why is there some much buzz right now? I think it’s because we’re all playing catch up to those who are proudly reaping the benefits of a great bench. I am.
