Antique & Classic Cars Blog

If you like to wrench on cars, you have to have a good spot to do it. Some things you’ll do on the car, of course, but garages get cold in Minnesota’s December! My buddy Lee is a writer-photographer who just finished a book on garage projects–one of which was a workbench. He needed some help building it, so I got a free bench for helping him out.

But I don’t have to tell any American that life is busy and time is short. We built a nice bench and could have screwed the top down, but I wanted to glue it too. The planks we got at Home Despot were pretty good but not dead perfect. Being the precise person I am, I wanted to plane the edges, edge glue the boards and then screw the top down. Probably overkill, but some jobs–like rebuilding instrument panel pieces–involve small parts and I didn’t want them dropping between the boards on my bench. Also, gluing the top so that it behaves like a single piece of wood will add stability–not that this bolted behemoth is short on that.

The thing itself is simple and sturdy. We used 4×4s for the legs, 2×6s for the top, and 2×4s as supporting frames for the top and the shelf below. The frame is screwed together then bolted to the legs. Pretty solid. The shelf is many pieces of laminated wood that we bought instead of plywood because we didn’t need a full 4′x8′ sheet and it was available in close to the size we needed. Waste not, want not.

I brought the beast home, put it where I’d designed it to go and then measured the lean. I knew the floor wasn’t level–there’s a drain down there and the floor slopes away from the walls to make mopping and pushing water toward the floor drain easy.

A basic carpenter’s level laid across the frame for the top revealed that the wall side was 1/2 inch higher than the front of the bench.

It wasn’t rocket surgery (to steal from my friend, furniture builder Keith Moore) to determine that sawing a 1/2 inch off the wall-side legs would give me a dead level bench.

A workbench doesn’t need to be level, one could argue, but when you’re dealing with car parts, many of which are round (bearings) or cylindrical (tubing), level means you don’t have to chase parts as they head for the floor.

Shortening the wall-side legs a half inch yielded dead level, so it was time to glue up the top. But first a few spots needed to meet my handplane. Laying the boards out, numbering them to avoid confusion, and marking the offending areas with pencil made this job a snap–it’s easy to tame pine but try working maple with hand tools.

With the planks marked, numbered and planed, it was time to glue ‘er up. Fortunately I’ve saved some cardboard odds and ends from various projects for just such purposes as protecting the shelf below from drips. (Note that wives are always impressed by that. They never say, “when are you ever going to use those ugly scraps of paper?”)

Run a bead of wood glue down each edge, smooth it out with a finger, set the boards together, and clamp ‘er up. You clamp two ways of course–side-to-side with the pony bar clamps to bond the edges and top to bottom to make sure the top doesn’t bow and no boards pop up. Tomorrow, the top can be screwed down to the frame and the vise I got from friends Rachelle and Susan (who bought an old dining room table with the thing mounted to it) can have a new home.

If you read about the cool ‘63 Borg Warner four-speed I sourced in Fountain City, WI, this bench will be the site for rebuilding it. Sweet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Car parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.