Workbench, part 3

Workbench progress.

Pocket hole screwing + gluing the table saw box on.

Those are Wen 4" pocket hole clamps. They just barely fit 2x4 pocket holes edge on like that. They help keep the 2x4s aligned while driving in the pocket hole screws. 

Adding edge banding to the shelves. Tiny $12 palm-sized iron works perfectly.

Needed some edge band trimmers, so printing those while I put the edge banding on

The edge band trimmers use M3 melt in inserts

Also did some of the M3 melt in inserts for CubeXY. Yes, that's still going to be a thing...eventually. Got to use one of the melt in insert soldering iron tips I turned awhile back. 

These work great. Found them on thingiverse.

Edge banding done, time to stain:

Factory edge=bad

I sanded them with 220 grit, wiped the dust off, cleaned them with mineral spirits, and then sealed them with stain primer. I stained the edges (banding) of the table saw shelf golden oak, but didn't bother staining the rest of it since it won't be visible. I stained the router shelf "golden pecan", however, it came out a lot redder than I was expecting. Lessons learned: The Varathane "premium" stain colors are NOT the same as the "classic" stain colors. The classic golden pecan doesn't have much red in it and is what I used for the base shelves. The premium golden pecan is actually very close to the classic "Ipswich Pine". Meh, luckily it's a workbench, and I'm already mixing a ton of wood tones, so it doesn't really matter. The edge banding didn't take the stain as much as the plywood. Also, factory edges, while straight, need to be cleaned up because the stain will accent the underlying grain.

While I had the printer going, I decided to use up some old shitty (Eryone brand, bleh) filament I had and print some wood working tools. 

♫ Part of a marking gauge, two mini sanding blocks,
and a set of center finding of guides ♫ (3rd day of Xmas)

Right angle clamp blocks, printed two sets ~800g

Time to install the table saw shelf:

Screwed on the table saw vacuum adapter

Clamped, then screwed down the shelf.

Looks good, very rigid

I won't be able to see the top surface, so I didn't bother filling in the screw holes. I installed the router shelf next: 

Left side of shelf. Center: The Mini-Motivator 

This was tricky. I drilled (normal sized, not the "HD" ones) pocket holes in the bottom of the left side of the shelf to screw to the left vertical 2x4s. There's a 3/16" thick spacer that has to go on the right side between the shelf and the horizontal 2x4, which I made by gluing together strips of 1/8" and 1/16" plywood. That shim is necessary because the left bandsaw pivot bearings mount to the top of that horizontal 2x4, and they need to be at a specific height. I used glue in all of the joints and used a ton of clamps to hold everything in place while I drove in the pocket hole screws. Leveling the shelf required a lot of unclamp-shift something-clamp-check level operations. Weirdly, while I was doing that, I realized that the shelf couldn't be clamped flush to the horizontal 2x4 in order to be level. 

Uh-oh...the shim needed shims.

The shelf ended up needing to be spaced about 1/16" lower at the back than the front. It was then that I checked level of the top of the horizontal 2x4: it was slanted. Hmm... re-measuring the back vertical 2x4 it was resting on showed that it was about 1/32" too long. Then I checked the CAD. Ugh, that same 2x4 was 1/32" too long. Didn't notice because it was such a small interference. 1/32+1/32 ... there's my extra 1/16". By this time, it was too late to fix because I'd already screwed it all together and the glue had partially set. So I used the handheld belt sander to sand down the top of the horizontal 2x4. 

Now it reads level. 

I also screwed on a few more horizontal 2x4s. These required a bit of fancy clamping, but all the joints came out good. 

A bunch of the horizontal 2x4s need notches cut in them. Some need to be re-sawn, which I'll need the table saw for, so I'm going to start refurbing that soon. 

Workbench, part 2

 Made a lot of progress on the workbench. 

I need to notch one of the long side 2x4's for the bandsaw to be able to rotate down. The only way to avoid this would have been to make the workbench surface height taller, but I already designed it to be as tall as I wanted to be. So...notch it is, and I decided to try to use the reciprocating saw for this.

What a mess...super uneven, too

The beam is too long to make the notch on a table saw with a dado blade, and it was already installed anyways.  You can also make notches with a circular saw by making a comb, then using a chisel to knock out the teeth, but there isn't really enough surface area here to safely hold a circular saw edge-on. Turns out the right way to make notches like this is to make a comb with a hand saw, then knock out the teeth with a chisel. Eh, oh well. Gotta clean it up and reinforce it: 

Lots of wood filler. Also a thick steel strap on the inside. 

Looks slightly less than bad after sanding and staining the wood filler. 

Next step was installing all of the base shelves.

Shelves stained and screwed in

The band saw notch wood filler staining mess made me want to try to get the wood filler color to match better. I bought about 12 of little samples of varathane oil based stain. The DAP "premium" wood filler I have says to mix the stain in before applying the wood filler, so I tried that, but the results weren't very good.

The amount of stain necessary to darken the filler, even if using really dark stain, is so much that the filler ends up being runny. I also tried some test hole fills with staining after applying the wood filler, didn't really notice an appreciable difference, and it was easier to stain after applying. I had to use a stain quite a few shades darker than the surrounding wood, though, and because the filler is white, no matter what you do, the stained filler always looks sort of "pastel". 

Not terrible, but not great either. Wish I had taken the time to pocket hole the shelves from the bottom. Also tried filling in one of the 2x4 radius gaps a little, but didn't like the results, so didn't do it anywhere else.  

Two lessons learned here: 1. Stained wood filler sucks. It's good for filling wood you will be painting, but it's not useful for professional looking final stained wood. Design future wood working projects to not need it. 2. There's a good reason why wood workers plane all of their wood. Everything ends up squarer, better tolerances, fewer gaps, etc. 

Luckily this is a garage workbench, so looks don't really matter. 

Next, I spaced the base off the floor and leveled it. By leveling the base, I can use a level to level the horizontal 2x4 beams and make sure the vertical 2x4 beams are straight up. My garage, like most garages, has a slight slope towards the door to help water drain out if it ever floods, so I compensated for that. 

Then I started cutting all of the vertical and horizontal 2x4s with my miter saw. Regularly got better than 1/32" accuracy on length, though I noticed some of the 2x4s were up to 1/8" oversized in a dimension (1-5/8 vs 1-1/2 and/or 3-5/8 vs 3-1/2)...should make putting this together interesting.  

Running out of room, time to move outside

Lots of 2x4s, lots of colors, lots of saw dust:

This thing works great

The mitered pieces will form the box under the plywood shelf that the table saw sits on. First time using a strap clamp, went really well: 

 I started installing the vertical columns next.

So many pocket holes O.o

Turns out pocket holes kinda suck for alignment. As the screw is driven in, it can cause the 2x4 to shift some. Ideally I could clamp them in place with a pipe/bar clamp (normal pocket hole clamps don't have enough reach for 2x4s oriented like this), but there was no way to get a clamp to these inside ones. Another problem came from not having planed/squared the base 2x4s: the vertical 2x4s wouldn't sit vertical, so even if I could clamp them, they likely would have shifted after removing the clamps. This was exacerbated by the pocket hole screws being on one side, which tended to tilt the 2x4 to that side. Thus, installing each vertical 2x4 required shimming with index cards and multiple screw - unscrew - screw cycles. Some required 1/32-1/16" wood shims instead of index cards. I used wood glue in the joints, too, to help make them stiffer. I used three pocket holes on some 2x4s; I spaced the two on one side out more and had the third centered on the other side, which helped with the tilting issue. These HD pocket hole screws (#14 x 2.5") require a lot of torque to drive in. This happened after about 40 to the T25 drive that came with the kit: 

Ouch

Luckily, I had two more 6" long T25 bits, but I suspect I'll need to buy more by the time I'm done. The reason they need so much torque is the #14 part: that's a wide screw with no pilot hole. There just isn't a good way to make pilot holes for these though, because, even with a 12" long 1/8" drill bit, there isn't a good way to keep it axially aligned with the pocket hole in the other piece, and if you get the angle or location wrong, it'll pull the joint out of alignment. With a lot of patience and shimming, I was able to get them all pretty close to vertical. 

Lesson learned: learn mortise and tenon joinery and use it for beams like this instead of using big pocket hole screws. Pocket hole screws might be ok for drawers/shelves, etc, but they aren't great for this application. 

I bought some 1/2" and 3/8" dowels to make plugs for the pocket hole holes. I have a nice fine tooth handsaw, and I'll probably 3D print a miter box for it to get the angles right, but that's for later. I took a break from pocket-holery to glue (5 minute epoxy) the vacuum adapters together, which I had 3D printed out of PETG a few weeks ago. 

The big one on the right is for under the table saw (more on that in a minute). You can see where I ran out of black PETG and changed to clear PETG. The one in bottom left is for the drum sander. Not pictured is another piece for the drum sander and one for the bandsaw. 

I used the router in the router table with a 3/4" bit to make notches in three of the vertical 2x4s.

These are going to be for little blocks of wood that will keep the drum sander locked in the up or down position. I cut little half circles on the outward facing sides so I could get my finger in behind the blocks, and I hardened the inner surfaces with thin CA. Then I installed these on the base. 

Due to the way I designed it, I need to install the router shelf before I can install many of the horizontal 2x4s (will be clearer in next post). That shelf is cut from the same 23/32" nice pine plywood that the base shelves are made out of. I used the circular saw for that. While I had the circular saw out, I decided to cut the table saw shelf out of some cruddy 5/8" plywood I've had for a long time. This shelf will be screwed down to the 2x4 box I showed earlier, and the table saw will sit on top of it. As such, I wanted to have a dust collection port in the shelf, so I designed that big 3D printed vacuum adapter in the above picture to fit in a 5.5"x5.5" hole with 1/4" corner radii, meaning I need to cut that hole in the plywood shelf. Hmm...never made a (nice) square hole in a piece of wood before. Turns out it's pretty straight forward. First, I marked the 5.5" square on the wood where I wanted it (centered under the table saw blade). Then I measured the radius from the spindle center to the outer base edge of my router (3"), then subtracted the radius of the bit I was going to use (1/2" 2 flute end mill) = 2.75". 5.5+2*2.75 = 11". So I drew an 11" square around the 5.5" square. Luckily I had cut the shelf pretty square, so it made drawing the squares using a carpenter square easy ("square square drawing squares on a ... rectangle", whatever). I then drilled 1/2" holes inside but near the corners of the 5.5" square and used a jig saw to rough cut the hole.

I'm a big fan of the Kobalt 24V brushless tool line.
They're just as strong as plug in, but way easier to use

Next, I clamped a bunch of random straight things I had around the 11" square. In the future, I'm going to 3D print some fasteners for some t-slot aluminum extrusions in order to make a nice router jig to do this. 

Then I just pushed the router around inside the 11" square, which made an almost-perfect 5.5" square with 1/4" radius corners. The 3D printed vacuum adapter fit perfectly. 

Here's where it will go

Finally, all of the vertical 2x4s are installed. Table saw and router shelves to be installed next.

Workbench, part 1

I've been working on a workbench for my garage-shop. Since space is at a premium, I decided I wanted it to both be a work surface and a place to hold some of my larger wood working tools. 

I started with mock CAD models of the tools: bandsaw (12" Craftsman), table saw (10" Craftsman), drum sander, miter saw (10" Skil compound sliding), and router table (Kobalt). These models have accurate dimensions but not most of the details. I spent some time arranging them in logical fashion. I wanted the miter saw and router table to have long in-feed and out-feeds, which necessitated putting them in the middle of the long edges. Luckily, they both fit in the middle. The band saw doesn't need much in-feed, nor does it need any work surface to the left of it (because of the throat), but a long out-feed would be nice, so that meant sticking it in a left corner facing and end. The drum sander needed to be in a corner to make working around it easier. That left the table saw on the other end, which gives maximum out-feed table length. Unfortunately, it doesn't give the table saw much width to work with, definitely not enough to cut long boards or sheet goods on it, nor room for a longer fence. My plan for that is to create a separate table with adjustable, folding legs that I can place on either side of the work bench to give the table saw more width to work with...more on that later.

After getting the layout down, I went on to create the framing from 2x4's (1.5x3.5's). The bandsaw, miter saw, and drum sander all rotate down, and a work surface is attached to their bases that rotates up. The table saw is very heavy and the surface is mostly flat, so I didn't see the point in trying to move it. The router table is light weight enough to move down a shelf. I designed work surface pieces to fit between the tools. I then added plywood shelves and drawers to many of the empty spaces.

Table saw left, router table middle, bandsaw right

Drum sander left, miter saw middle

Tools stowed

The top surfaces will be 3/4" MDF with an opaque (probably white-ish) top. The rest of the construction is 2x4s and plywood. The base's outer dimensions are 4ft x 8ft, though the table saw hangs out over the end a bit, and it's fence (to be replaced) hangs over the sides. I had almost all of the 2x4s needed from tearing down an old shelving unit in the garage. They are all older, have a lot more rings than you can buy in current 2x4s, and they're noticeably denser. They also aged to different and interesting hues:

top: recent Home Depot pine, middle two: old fir, 

bottom: very old unknown wood

I really like the mix of colors, I think it'll make the workbench interesting looking. I needed one more 8ft long 2x4 for the base and shockingly managed to find a straight one at Home Depot. Most of the 2x4s I have are straight, but the more-warped ones will be cut into the shortest pieces. Screwing into the end grain of a board is not a good idea because the screws can loosen over time, so most of the 2x4 (and other) joints will be by pocket hole joinery, specifically using the "HD" #14 screw ones, with wood glue. I tested this joint and it seems to be stiff enough. Ideally, I'd use mortise and tenon, but I don't have a setup for making those yet. 

Cutting the base 2x4s with the miter saw

I joined the four outer base 2x4s with pocket hole joints first. The base plywood shelves are recessed into the base frame. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this over placing a sheet of plywood on top of the base frame. Advantages: slightly more useable height, no need for edge banding to hide the plywood edge, no need to cut out notches for vertical 2x4s, easier to replace if become damaged (easier to remove and only need to remove the one shelf that is damaged). Disadvantages: have to cut up the plywood sheet (lots of cuts), harder to mount and level each shelf. To that last point, I designed these corner blocks to support the base shelves:

I made them close to the height that, if the 2x4 beams are resting on a flat surface, then placing them in the corner as in this picture results in their top surface being recessed down just enough for the plywood to sit level with the top of the 2x4s. I needed 20 of them, so I used an end stop on the miter saw to cut them all. Each one has four holes, so I printed out templates and spent a couple hours marking and drilling holes on the drill press. I used the "HD" pocket hole counterbore drill bit (1/2" counter bore, 1/4" hole) to drill the deep holes (left in above picture), and a normal 1/4" bit to drill the holes on right. The deep holes are offset inward to allow my driver to fit. I found these "Spax construction wafer head #10 2.5" T-star " screws at Home Depot, which are cheaper and thinner than the #14 pocket hole screws, but otherwise pretty similar. I figured I'd use the spax screws anywhere I didn't need the strength of the larger pocket hole screws, like for installing these corner blocks. I used a scrap piece of plywood to help install them at the right height.

Plywood was just resting underneath, didn't 

have anywhere else to store it

For the cross members, I installed four corner blocks on them first, sanded the ends flat, clamped them in the frame with pipe clamps at the correct location, then screwed the blocks (deep holes) into the 2x4s it was clamped between. The result is a very strong and stiff base frame. 

Next, I used a circular saw (60T blade) to cut the plywood sheet (23/32" nice pine) into the base shelves. I used a harbor freight clamping straight edge to do this, which I previously didn't have much luck with, but I was able to get within about 1/32" of the desired line this time. I guess practice helps. Given the fact that the recessed areas aren't perfectly rectangular, this was more than good enough.  Because I hadn't had much success with the straight edge previously, I left some extra on many of the edges, so I ended up using the circular saw to trim the extra off (made ~2x as many cuts as I really needed to). 

The base shelves

Flipped the frame over

I flipped the frame over in order to sand the four outer corners flat. I did my best when screwing the 2x4s together to make sure they were even, but the actual dimensions of the 2x4s varied by as much as an 1/8". One was 1 5/8" wide, instead of 1 1/2" wide, some were 3 7/16" tall instead of 3 1/2" tall. Thus, I needed to glue some 1/16" basswood shims in some places and sand down all the corners to make them flat. I used a handheld 3" belt sander to do this 

Flat corner

Why am I flattening the bottom corners? For casters! I bought four 4 inch casters for $35 off amazon. Load rating is 1800 lbs, and my CAD model estimates about 1200 lbs (tools and wood are heavy!), so these should work. This was another advantage of using the corner blocks: can use the shelf support blocks to mount the casters.

Test fit

The casters didn't come with wood screws, but luckily I had some 1/4" lag bolts (no idea from where), so I used those. I marked and drilled pilot holes before using my impact driver with a hex bit to drive them in.

Casters mounted, frame flipped back upright

I also got lucky that the frame ended up sitting flat, so I didn't need to shim the corners for the casters not to rock. The next step was to sand (palm sander + oscillating saw/sander) the tops of the corner blocks such that the shelves sit level with the tops of the 2x4s. About 3/4 of them needed some sanding, but only two needed a lot (~1/16") of material removed, so overall, I think that plan worked out pretty well. Some of the shelves had to be sanded out-of-square in order to fit, and I used the handheld belt sander to do that.

Test fitting a shelf

All shelves fit

The gap in the bottom left is for the top of the band saw to rotate into, and I'll be cutting a ~1" notch in the left 2x4 there. I'll reinforce that notch with a thick steel straight strap I found at Home Depot. 

Unfortunately, I underestimated the flexibility of the plywood, and the three long shelves bowed down a little in the middle. 

Middle of shelf sitting about 3/16" inch below top of 2x4

The solution was pretty simple: add middle support blocks. 

Middle blocks screwed+glued to sides with same recess 

as corner blocks

Sits flush now

Before I screwed the shelves down to the corner blocks, I decided I didn't like the fresh white pine coloring. It's just too light. Thus, I decided to stain the plywood shelves and the one new 2x4. I tried a bunch of different stains and settled on "golden pecan". It's still pretty light, but not as "white" as the raw pine. The process for staining was as follows: sand with 220 grit, vacuum dust, wipe with mineral spirits and lint-free cloth, brush on stain conditioner to seal (for soft woods like pine), wipe off excess conditioner, let conditioner dry 30 minutes, brush on stain, wipe off excess stain, let dry. 

Stained shelf. Sorry for crappy lighting

They came out nice. Coloring is much closer to that of the old fir 2x4s. I only did the tops of the shelves since the bottoms and sides will never be seen. 

Next steps:

• Finish staining pine
• Screw in the shelves
• Mix stain with wood filler and apply wood filler to screw holes and any gaps between shelves and 2x4s
• Sand wood filler, fix any sanded stain spots
• Seal shelves with 3 coats of polyurethane to protect them while building the rest of the workbench
• Start cutting and joining the vertical 2x4s

I'll show more details of the rotation mechanisms, electrical, vacuum ports, drawers, etc as I continue to build it. I've worked with wood before, but I've never done any woodworking projects this complicated, so this'll be an adventure.