Woodworking Bench
Project Summary
We are building a strong, stable bench to replace the "door bench" currently being used in the work shop. While we are going to be using designs for "woodworking" bench, our bench will be usable for all project types. We are going to use the designs and concepts defined in the Anarchist Workbench. This bench will be built from construction lumber (2xX), which we will mill to more exact dimensions), to form a large, think, glue-up table top and mortise and tenon joinery for the legs and stringers. Instead of glued or dry fitted joins we will use drawboring to secure our joints. This page will be used to track our plans and progress and manage communication as the project evolves.
Original Project Proposal
Current State of Project
Proposal. ACCEPTED!
Planning Mostly complete.
Material Acquisition In progress. We have bought an initial batch of 3 2x12x98 (on 12/09/25) for testing purposes. If all goes well we will buy the remainder, however we will likely continue to do this in batches.
Material Prep In progress.
Assembly
Action Items
- Finalize initial material purchase requirements
Currently projecting 8 2x12x96 for base and 9 2x12x96 for table top. Propose we round to 20 and add 10% for errors and bad board, bringing us to:
22 2x12x96 southern yellow pine. we should look for select structural (SS) grade, or failing that No.1 grade boards. they will be a little more expensive but fewer knots and chatter (hopefully)
- Purchase initial materials (2xX stock)
- Store material to get to appropriate moisture content
- Determine date for milling of material (will require a group of volunteers)
Volunteer Workdays
Future Workdays
- Saturday the 31st (1/31/26) - The agenda would be to try to take the process we proved out last workday (1/10/26) to mill down the larger 2x6s and do a batch of them. i would aim for 6 boards and then maybe to a test glue up (with out glue) to see if the clamps we have will work with the boards we produce if we have time.
Past Workdays
- 1/10/26 - Aimed to test our process for dimensioning the raw lumber into square usable boards. After minimal experimentation it was clear that using a pretty standard approach of facing a board on the jointer, then thickness planing on the planer is going to work for us. after that, using the faced surface as a reference, we could joint another side of the board to a square corner. finally we ripped the board to the correct width using this edge against the fence. we ended up with a 1.25"x 4.5" x 96" board that was very (if not perfectly) square. definitely looked good enough for a glue up.
Volunteers for workdays
If you are interested in helping on this project take a look at the "Woodworking Bench Project" stream in the Group Projects section in chat.hacksburg.org. I will be posting workdays and asking for help there.
Reference Material
Need to confirm that uploading the free version of the Anarchist Workbench pdf meet that hacksburg wiki guidelines, in the meantime here is a link