Articles
The Saw Bench
The saw bench is an absolute must have appliance for the hand tool shop. A pair is even better, especially if you process long stock in your shop with hand saws. In addition to supporting stock at a comfortable and convenient height for crosscutting and ripping, the saw bench serves a myriad of other uses in the shop. I use mine to sit on when boring with a brace, as a side table to hold tools and project parts when working at the shave horse, as support for case pieces when I'm planing their dovetails flush, as a bench to sit at when drawing at my workbench, as a step to reach the boards on the top tier of my lumber rack, as a place to sit and take a coffee break and as a second workbench for my kids when they are in the shop "working" with me.
The first saw bench I built years ago has seen a hard life and a lot of use so it was time to make a replacement and retire the old one. I don't like to over complicate tools and appliances for the shop as I consider them disposable. They get used hard and take a lot of abuse so I don't use expensive lumber or complicated joinery. I want something that will be sturdy and will last but won't cost a lot and will be quick and easy to build. The style of saw bench pictured fits that bill nicely and can be built with cheap lumber and traditional joinery. This makes it very sturdy since it doesn't rely on the strength of mechanical fasteners like nails or screws, but it also stays very lightweight and easy to move around or store out of the way when not needed. It's relatively small at about 30" long by about 12" wide and at about 18" tall (approximately knee height for me) it is the perfect height for processing lumber with hand saws. No shop should be without one of these, or preferably a pair. Click below to see how it was built.
The Saw Bench
A Cabinet for the Shoppe
I recently completed a wall cabinet for my shop and documented the build of the cabinet over on the Sawmill Creek Neanderthal Haven messageboard. I needed the cabinet to store solvents and finishes up high away from toddler fingers since my daughter frequently "works" in the shop with me. As I decided what I wanted to build, I thought that this would be a good project to document. It's also a good project for beginners to the craft, or seasoned veterans looking to work on more hand tool skills.
First, the cabinet can be built with very little lumber. I used mostly leftover pieces of Eastern white pine from other projects but you could get all the required boards for this project from the local home center for about $25. Second, I built it using a lot of traditional woodworking joints; case dovetails, rabbets, dados, blind mortise and tenon, through wedged mortise and tenon, edge joining, and raised panel. Finally it can be made with relatively few tools and is not complicated to build using only hand tools. If you don't have any means of making molding, you can buy premade moldings from the home center since they come in unfinished pine.
The cabinet I based mine on is one built by Mike Dunbar in an old issue of Fine Woodworking (Sept/Oct 2001). The main difference is that I made mine to hang on the wall and his was a free standing design. I also changed the dimensions slightly to better use the lumber I already had. Click the link below to read the build log!