Workbench Plans: How to Build a Workbench With Full Accessories

Who doesn't need a great workbench in their shop like this one right here? Now, here's what's gonna happen on this DVD. I'm gonna walk you through the procedure of making a workbench like this, with adjustable legs so that you can change the height of the bench, with a storage cabinet down below so you can fill that with all sorts of stuff, whatever you need to, a tray on top of the storage cabinet. That's for that little stuff that you often use on your bench. Tracks on the end of the bench that provide lateral holding power, for instance, when you're assembling a face frame, and also provide a hold-down. I'm also gonna show you how to install a vise on your bench, and in addition to a commercially made vise, we're gonna have a look at a shop-made vise that just uses a simple 3/4-inch pipe clamp to provide holding power. We're also gonna walk through the process of making bench dog holes real accurately in a nice straight line down your bench so that you can add bench dogs to it. Once we've got the bench dog holes in there, then we're gonna have a look at bench hangers. These are really cool shop-made devices that allow you to work on the edge of a shelf and clamp between a tail vise and the bench itself so that you can, for instance, hand plane or belt sand the edge of a long piece of stock. Get all that done, gonna show you an accessory that lets you shed a little light on your work too, so lots of great stuff. No matter what kind of bench you want or what kind of bench you have, you're gonna love all these different accessories that really optimize the work you can do at your workbench. Look at this. Our workbench is already done. Not really. All I wanna do now is talk about the top. There are a bunch of different approaches you could take here. Of course, you can make the top up yourself. Now, material selection, generally a workbench top is made out of a hardwood. Maple, because of its closed-grain nature and hardness is a very, very common choice. In this case, I ordered the benchtop, and we've sourced that on the DVD for you. There are a number of places where you can order these, and what I really want you to do before you make up one in your own shop, is look at the economics and the ease of ordering this from someplace else. Now, I know, when it comes to making a workbench, making every component of the bench is something a lot of woodworkers wanna do, and that's fine, but frankly, when you crunch the numbers here, and look at the dimensions that we have here, what you're gonna pay for the hard maple, and what you have to do to get it glued up and get it nice and flat, it's really worth a consideration to get one of these just into your shop that's been professionally made, so let's look again here at what we've got. Hard maple. I went with 24 by seven feet, and you can pick different dimensions. There's a lot of stuff out there in the marketplace. One of the things we want is a benchtop that's nice and thick so that when we support it from end to end, it's not gonna have any sag in the middle. That also gives it a lot of weight so that it's gonna stay put when we're working on it, so step one of making your workbench is to make the top first, and then we're gonna work our way down and dimension from there, so get the top in your shop, get that part all set, and then we can start moving forward with the rest of the workbench project. Now that we've got the top made up or ordered into the shop, the next thing we wanna do is figure out the base below the top, so in order to do that, we have to talk about your vices, like drinking, smoking, gambling. No, vise with an S, and one of the things we wanna look at is how the vises are gonna go on a workbench. Commonly, there's one on the long side, and there's one on the end, and they have different applications, so what we wanna look at here is what do we need to do with the base to make sure we have room for this vise to be here on the long edge? I wanna put it on this corner 'cause I'm right-handed, so if the vise is here, and there's stuff sticking out the vise, I can, say, use a handsaw on it with my right hand. If I was left-handed, I'd be putting this vise probably on the other corner. When we're all done, what's gonna happen is that this track is gonna get routed in flush with the end. The vise, which is pretty heavy, is gonna go next to it like this. I have to allow room here for bolts to go all the way through and not interfere with the track I'm doing over here, so positioning it like this, and, of course, the vise is gonna be under the bench, but it's way too heavy for me to hold under there, positioning like this shows us that I need to allow about 12 inches of overhang to compensate for the width of the track and the width of my vise before the base of my bench starts up, so if I have a 12-inch overhang on this side to keep things centered, I'm also gonna do a 12-inch overhang on the other side. That's also gonna help with the tail vise that I wanna put over there that we haven't looked at yet, so 12 inches of overhang per side, so we can do the math. It's an 84-inch benchtop. I'm gonna take two feet off of that, so from seven, I end up at five feet, 60 inches. Then I'm gonna have a 60-inch total base underneath my benchtop, so it's very simple math in order for you to figure out how you're gonna get your base dimensioned to fit under the top based on what you're doing with vises and other accessories here on the top of the bench. Before we get into making the base for this workbench, let's talk about these ends that I'm choosing to use. These are commercially made, adjustable in height, which is a really cool feature. Now, you may or may not use these under your workbench. That's fine. A real traditional way to make a frame under a workbench would be very heavy legs, mortise-and-tenon joinery to join the rails to the legs. That's fine. I just really, really like the mobility I get from the casters and the ability to adjust the height of the bench depending on what I'm doing with it, so for me, I have to take into account the size of the ends in order to determine the size of the cabinet that's gonna go in between, so remember that I wanna make my base 12 inches shorter per side, 24 inches total, shorter than my top, so from the outside of this metal base to the outside of this metal base is gonna be 60 inches, so in order to make up my cabinet that's gonna go in between, I take away this, which is three, and that, which is three, so from that 60 I'm taking away six. That means I need a 54-inch-long cabinet to go in between. Now, again, with design decisions, I decided that when the cabinet is underneath here, I want it to be accessible from both sides. My workbench typically lives in the middle of the shop, not up against a wall, so I wanted to have it accessible from both sides, so that means I need to make a face frame for both sides, so we're gonna look at the face frame itself in just a second, but components of the face frame, couple things are critical. Down here at the bottom of this metal bench end, I've got a caster assembly, and the caster assembly is hold in place with a compression nut on this bolt. That's gonna stay there. The other one, the second one, that would normally be down here, gets removed when we're gonna make a bench like we are here, so when I make my face frame, this is the stile for my face frame, I have to do two things down here to compensate for the caster assembly. One, I have to notch it, my stile, so that it can wrap over the angle iron that the caster assembly is fastened to. I also have to make, effectively, a mortise here. That mortise will sit over that compression nut, so I did that by drilling overlapping holes with a 5/8-inch Forstner bit. That gave me plenty of clearance to put that like that. Now, the other thing I had to do was a little bit of a chamfer down there at the bottom 'cause here on this angle iron, this inside corner is not a crisp 90 degrees. It's kind of a rounded fillet, so I had to take a little bit off of there so that when that stile goes on, like that, it can seat against the metal end, go over the compression nut, and go tight against the angle iron down there, allowing for that fillet at the bottom of the angle iron. If you wanna be double-sided, you need four of these stiles. Length of them is equal to the distance from the top of the angle iron to the top of this lower unit. Your rails, which connect the stiles, the length of those will be determined by how long you're gonna make the base of your bench, so again, my inside to inside on mine is 54 inches, so here I've got a face frame that's already put together. Got my stiles on the end that have their notch. They've got their mortise. They've got the chamfer down here at the bottom, and they're fastened to my rails, so let's look at that and how that all worked out. This is just like making a face frame for any cabinet. I'm using screw pockets with glue in the joint to hold everything together. Now a good question will be once I have this, how do I get this end fastened to this end? And the answer is a long threaded rod that goes all the way through. That's the deal. That's the deal with this groove I have in the face frame here. This groove is gonna end up aligned with this hole. A second groove, which still has to be cut up here, is gonna be aligned with this hole, and a 3/8 threaded rod is gonna go all the way through from end to end with compression nuts on the outside, so we're gonna make a big cabinet sandwich when this is done, and this is the center component that holds everything at just the right distance. When you make these grooves, because I'm using 3/8 threaded rod, I recommend you make them 1/16 wider and 1/16 deeper than the size of the threaded rod just to make assembly easy, so 7/16 by 7/16 on that groove. I cut that after the whole face frame was put together. That's the easiest way to do that. When you do that, double-check and make sure that you're gonna miss your screw-pocket screws up here, so we really wanna check that and make sure that when we locate these holes on these pieces which leads to this groove, that we're away from that screw-pocket screw, all right? So again, if you wanna be double-sided, you need two of these face frames. If you're gonna be single-sided, you only need one. There'd be a solid back on the other side. With the face frame done, next step can be making the top and the bottom of the cabinet that are gonna go in between. Now we have a cabinet ready to go in between the two metal ends, so let me talk about how I got here and what I did. Once the face frames were done, I temporarily clamped those to the metal ends. Then I could measure in between the two face frames to determine how wide the sheet stock had to be that was gonna live in between those two face frames. For the sheet stock, I chose to go with MDF for a couple reasons. One is, doesn't need to be pretty 'cause you're only rarely gonna see the stuff. The other thing I like is that the MDF is heavy, heavier than an old veneered plywood would be, so it adds some mass to my workbench. Once I knew that dimension, I ripped the MDF to size so it could fit in between the face frames. Then I crosscut it so that it would be exactly the same length as the face frames. Then I used a biscuit joiner in order to join the edges of the MDF to the back of the face frame. Now, the way that went together is that the top piece of MDF is even with the bottom of the rail. Down on the opposite end, down on below, the top of that MDF is even with the type of this rail, underneath the door track, so that did a couple things for me. One is it made it real easy to use the biscuit joiner and get everything put together. Here on the top of the cabinet, it created a well, so imagine, once our ends are on and our top is on, now I have a little well in here that I can store stuff in, and it isn't gonna fall off the top of the cabinet. Once that was all biscuit-joined together, I added these inside corner blocks. These are gonna serve a couple of purposes. One, they're just gonna reinforce the joinery between the face frame and the MDF 'cause they're glued to both surfaces. The other thing is that when the threaded rod comes in here and we tension it from both ends, sometimes that can cause the threaded rod to distort a little bit. By having these blocks on the outside of the groove, it's gonna stabilize that threaded rod, so it's gonna be much stronger than it would otherwise be. It's not a must-do, but it's a nice thing to do, so that takes care of the base for this thing. Now let's talk about this door track. Sliding door track is very easy to install. It's made out of plastic. It can be cut on your miter saw, so what I did with these is they come too long, put them in place, marked one end, cut it on the miter saw so that they're both cut identically. The big deal here is you gotta get the right track in the right spot. When you use sliding door track, one component is narrow, or short. The other component is taller. The tall component always goes on the top, and when we slip the doors in here, you'll see why that's gonna make sense. There are a variety of ways you could install these. One of the easiest is to just use silicone caulk, so what I did was I put a bead of silicone caulk on the bottom of that plastic track. The masking tape that you can still see in place was my clamp, so I had five or six pieces of blue masking tape all the way down the length of that track to hold it until the silicone dried. What I like about the silicone is that that way I'm not putting a fastener inside the track that might inhibit the movement of the door, so it keeps everything moving nice and smooth, so we can get the base put together, insert your door track, and the cabinet here, then, is complete. I'm ready to get the threaded rod in here, get the ends bolted together, and everything put together, so what I've done is I propped my cabinet up on blocks on that end. I'm gonna bring this over, and we'll see how this goes. In all honesty, probably not a bad spot to have another pair of hands, but we are hand short today, so we'll see how this happens. Like this, like this, and then those bolts are gonna go into the mortises that I created kind of like that. Let me fix this end before it falls down, and really, once you get a threaded rod in, friction is gonna help hold everything for you here. All right, threaded rod is still too long, and I'm okay with that 'cause that'll get cut later, so second verse, same as the first, all the way down here we're just gonna keep sliding the threaded rod in place and get everything bolted together here. All right, here's where I'm at. What I did was I put the two top ones in and got those so they're sticking out on the other side just a couple inches. Then I brought the other end in, and the nuts and the washers are on that end, so that's kind of just loosely holding everything together. You can see there's still a gap here. I'm not worried about that. Then I got bottom right, my right, in place. Same thing: it's through the end on that side with a nut and a washer on it. I'll do this last one, get this one all the way through, and then I'm gonna close this up. Now, I've got a rotary tool with a cutoff wheel on it. That's how I'm gonna get into this tight spot after the fact and cut these off. If you don't, be almost impossible to get a hacksaw way in here, so in that case, you'd wanna cut the rod to length ahead of time, but the rotary tool is gonna work good, so next step for me, I'll finish this. Then come back, start tightening these up, so we draw everything closed, and that's gonna take care of the base here. Well, once all the rods were cut to length, then I started tightening this up. Now, there's a nut on this end and a nut on that end. That's why that other open-end wrench is jammed in down there, so that's doing a nice job of closing the steel ends against the wooden cabinet. We'll get that nice and tight, and that fastens these ends to my wooden cabinet. Now remember, with your sliding door track, we've got a wide track on the top and a narrower track on the bottom. When you make your doors, they're gonna scoot up into the top track and then rest into the bottom track. That's why we have to do the big one on top. When you buy track, you can buy that track for lots of different thicknesses, typically 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4. Small project like this, the 1/4-inch track for hardboard works just fine. Bigger project, you might want the 3/4 track, which would work for big plywood doors, so when I install, I'm gonna put this in the upper track first, lift it over the bottom track, and then just let it drop in. When you cut these to size, the way to do that, the way to get the size, is to measure from the inside of the top track, so I let it bottom out inside there, to the top of the bottom track, and that's your overall height. For length, what we wanna do is have about an inch of overlap in the middle, so the way you get an inch of overlap is measure to the center, add 1/2 inch to this door, measure to the center, 1/2 inch to this door. Then they're gonna overlap by an inch in the middle. Let me try this one. That one's really nice. It's nicely closed up against the stile. This one touching on the bottom and open probably not quite 1/8 of an inch at the top, so that's an easy fix. Gonna take that out, and then just skin a little bit off the bottom. And I'll just keep doing that. Test it again until I eliminate that gap. Basically, I'm just kind of planing it to fit. There we go. Now, with the holes for your pinkies to go into, 1-inch hole works pretty well for that. Make sure when you do this, you're creating a left and a right. We don't want all the holes located in the same spot 'cause then, if you do that, you're gonna have to put two of your doors in inside out, so make sure you create lefts and rights when you do your drilling, and that is all it takes to put in sliding doors. We'll measure very carefully, regardless of what kind of base you're using under your workbench, and get your bench centered or whatever configuration you want here. I am centered on this one, 12 inches of overhang past this point on each end, and then centered left to right across the width, so make sure you have that just right. Now, if you're using the adjustable ends, make sure you follow the manufacturer's instructions about fastening the brackets on the bottom 'cause there's a little trick there to make sure that it allows this to go up and down because of the angle it travels through. Once you have it where you want it, we wanna predrill 'cause this is hard maple. And then I'm gonna get one on this side. Wouldn't it be a shame to drill through the top of your bench at this point? Man, hate to even think about it. There we go. Couple more screws on this one. The other end is already in place, and the bench is securely fastened to the base. Now that the top has been installed, we can start setting it up with all the cool stuff. Now, no matter what kind of workbench you have, you're gonna find the additions I make to this one really cool, so one of the things I wanna do is cut these tracks in. These are made by Kreg, and once they're in, they're gonna do all sorts of different stuff for us: carry hold-downs, give us something to work up against, but we've got to get them in the table so that the top of the track is even with the top of the table. Obviously, this end back here is gonna end up being cut off. What I'm gonna do is let this track exit this way so I can slide stuff into the T-track here, this track exit this way so I can slide stuff in. As an alternative, you could do something like this: leave the corner open underneath here, and then you could slide both ends of this one, and from the single end on this one, so that part doesn't really matter, but what I need to know on this one is where to quit when I get to that end, so I'm making this flush with the end of the workbench here, and then, when I come down here, I'm gonna mark this end. Now, the way I'm gonna do this is I'm gonna use a router with a fence, so that router bit's gonna come along, and I want it to stop when it gets to this pencil line, and I'm gonna be using it like this, so now I've got the router unplugged for this setup. I'm gonna turn the cutter so that the carbide tip is toward me. Then I'm gonna let that sit right down on the tabletop, and what I'm doing here is I'm putting that carbide right on the pencil line that I just drew, and I'm gonna put a line on the table here that indicates the edge of the router base. The reason I'm doing that, that's where I want the router to stop 'cause then the bit's gonna stop there, so I'm gonna clamp a piece of scrap to the table. Now every time the router comes along, it's gonna stop when it hits that scrap so I don't overcut. Then our next thing is we can set that bit to match the thickness of our track, and then what I'll do, I don't wanna take everything out at once, but I'll control that cut with the fence, so I'm gonna bring the router here, letting it sit on the track, loosen up its plunge mechanism, drop it down till it touches the bench, lock it in place. Then, on this side of the router, I can set the stop rod on the turret, so now, every time I come down, I should be at that exact same setting 'cause that's what the stop rod is controlling, so that gives me my depth of cut. Next step, we can get a fence on there. And this'll change a little bit from manufacturer to manufacturer, but this one scoots in like this, locks in place with these wing nuts, and then, by moving the whole fence over, what I'll be able to do is bury part of the bit in my wooden fence, so I'm only gonna use a portion of this cutter for that first pass, just a little bit less than half of it, so then, as I make subsequent passes, I'll loosen this assembly, move the fence back, make another pass, just keep going till I have this all routed out. So when I dial this back, I am exposing a little bit more bit from the fence, lock that down. It's just slow and steady. We'll just keep going here. Hard wood, that maple, and there's a lot of it to take out, so this is a race that goes to the steady, not to the swift. I have really made a mess. There's chips all over the floor here. My depth of cut is fine. My width is not quite there yet. It's gonna take just one more pass. There's maybe a strong 1/4 inch to go this way, so here's how I'm gonna control it. First step, unplugify the router. Then I'm gonna come up to my plunge position. Now, what we're looking at is the distance from that part of the cutter to that part of the fence, so I'm simply gonna put the track on here, and align those two, and with this particular fence, it's handy. It's got a microadjust on it, so if I get close, I can finesse it with a microadjust, and what I'm gonna do is dial this in. Right now, it feels like it's not quite there. It's got to go just a little bit more, but that's okay, and I'm gonna do a test cut, and then, if I need to, I can open this up some more in order to take a little bit more wood out. All right, let's see how that looks. That's gonna be okay. That's all right, right there, so I'm gonna go ahead and make this pass all the way around. All right, now this is gonna go in there. Goes like this, sorta, but it's got an inside corner down there that's round and, of course, the track is square, so what I'm gonna need to do is use a chisel, square off that inside corner, so I'll take care of that. Then we also have to look at the bolts that go through the bottom of the track and secure it into the bench itself. Now, the way I got started here was I used a straightedge, and I got that straightedge in line with my router cut and then just drew a line same thing going this way, drew a line, so that extended the line of the router cut here to define the inside corner. Now, good sharp chisel, bevel side that way, bevel side to the waste side, and initially, I'm gonna do just a really light tap just to kind of score the surface. Then I'll give that a few more taps like that just to help get things going, and then horizontal to peel that out of there. Don't ever pry with a chisel 'cause it's a good way to break it, so the wood's got to wanna come out of there like a loose tooth. Now, once that's established, I've got a shoulder there. I hold the back of the chisel against that shoulder in order to register it. All right, let's see how that looks with a track in there, right up into the inside corner, so we're all set there. Now, there's just a little chip that happened right here, and I don't like it, but there's nothing I can do about it now, so my fix for something like that is gonna be I'll use a random orbit sander, and I'll work on this, and I'll just kind of feather that in. I'm gonna take some material off, try to work it out, work it out, work it out, so I don't wanna just dish this, but I wanna feather that back to the good area so that it's gonna look like it didn't happen initially, and that'll fix that, so last thing is we just got to look at anchoring the track to the bench. What I'm doing now is boring. Ha, what I'm doing is boring holes. I laid everything out following the manufacturer's instructions, and when you look at this, it's a lot of bolts, but the benefit to doing it correctly is that it really puts a lot of holding power on these tracks, and it really is gonna let you grab onto your work, so do the same thing. Follow the manufacturer's instructions. Then the easiest way to assemble everything is to drop these bolts in. Now, what I did is the holes are oversized. It's 1/4-inch bolts. I drilled 5/16 holes. That gives me a little bit of wiggle room on putting everything together. The track go in this way. I've already got that cut to length, so it'll butt up against the track I'm putting in now. Then, this'll just engage those bolts. All right, now, with the wiggle room that's in there, when I snug the bolts, I can slide that in like that, so it's nice and tight, so at this point, this is easy. All I need to do is get a washer and a nut on every one of these bolts, and then snug it up, and I'm just gonna continue that process all the way down. Now, let's back up a couple steps. When I set my depth of cut for that router bit in order to make this recess, I set it up so that this track is just a smidgen below. It's just what I would call a fingernail catch below the surface of my workbench. That's where I want it so that it's not gonna be in perfect alignment across the top, or worse yet, end up too high is what I'm really trying to stay away from, so just a smidgen below there. Take it nice and easy on those router passes. As you could hear from me making those cuts, these maple tops are real hard, and just make it easy on yourself and your machine by taking light passes. That track is gonna be really useful and really get a good workout in this shop. Having a hold-down on your workbench is very, very handy, but maybe you don't want a system as extensive as the track I did on the big bench, so I've got a little bench in here, and I'm gonna show you another way that you can do this, so that's part of what I wanna do on this video is show you a lot of different approaches to making your workbench a happier place and more useful bench. This plate can get routed into a benchtop, and the way it works is that that keyhole will receive that bolt, so once I have that open, I can snap into the keyhole. When that's been routed into the bench, I can throw this, and it'll hold your work down to the tabletop, so it's pretty cool, and a lot easier to do than the track we just did. Doesn't offer as much versatility, but very easy installation. Here's how I do this. First thing you wanna do is make a frame that's exactly the same size as the plate. The way I did that is I ripped these pieces of plywood to the width of the aluminum. Then, when I put it all together, I actually put the aluminum in here like that, closed these gently against it, and glued everything together this way, just like you're gluing up a big panel. That results in a square hole in the middle. The way we'll use this is with a pattern stile router bit, so pattern bits have a ball bearing with a cutter below. The ball bearing is gonna ride the frame and make the hole below the exact same dimension as the frame. The only thing we'll have to do then is square up the inside corners because they're gonna be left round by the bit. We need them to be square in order to receive the plate, so next thing I'll do, I'll get this in the router, get this clamped onto my bench, and we'll have a look at making the recess. Now we need to get the depth of cut set on this, so first thing I'm gonna do is clamp this to the table. When you locate this keyhole slot, as a rule, I put it in the corner of a bench so that I have a lot of real estate this way to work with. The reason for that is probably my number-one application for the keyhole slot is assembling face frames, and generally, I'm using that clamp to hold a corner of a face frame down while I drive screws through screw pockets, so I want a lot of room this way for those face frames to extend. When you set the depth of cut, put the router over the area where you're gonna cut, let the bit kiss the surface, let it touch down, and then, on plunge routers, we've got a stop rod here and a turret below. I'm just gonna put the plate in between the top of the turret and the bottom of the stop rod, and lock the ride. Now, right there, that's pretty snug, and I want there to be just a little bit of wiggle room. In other words, I want the plate to end up slightly below the surface, so what I'm doing is I'm leveraging the plate like this to push the stop rod up so that this is just a little bit loose right there. Now my pattern's clamped. My depth is set. All I gotta do is plug the router in. It's a really good idea to just have a look down in there before you take this off because it's not impossible, but it's difficult to get the template in exactly the same spot again, so what I'm looking for is did I really flatten the bottom out? I can feel my way around here with my finger, and what I'm checking is, is the wall of the recess even with the wall of the pattern? And if there are any high spots there, be really easy right now to run the router again and clean them up. This one feels good, so that's what we've got so far. The only hole in the system is square peg round hole, so next, I'll take a chisel, and I'll square off those corners. One more step, like I said, to create a recess underneath here, but we'll do that after the corners are cleaned up, and these, what I'm doing is I'm using a nice wide chisel, and with my thumb, I'm pushing the back of the chisel up against the cut that the router bit made. That's why you don't see any pencil lines on these corners, so that's how I'm referencing that straightedge to keep everything lined up, and then, we better check this. Now you can tell here that there's wood right below the plate, so if I take my clampity-clamp, and put it in there, it won't go in. We've got to create a relief under that keyhole, so I'm going to trace this, and then that plate comes back out. It's a really good fit. Oh, there we go. Now I've got that keyhole shape here. I'm gonna use a Forstner bit, and the benefit to doing this with a Forstner is that I can do overlapping holes all the way down. For depth of cut, what I need to do is drill deeply enough that the head of this screw or bolt can go below the plate, so it doesn't take much, 1/4, 3/8 of an inch would be fine, which is about half the size of my Forstner bit in this direction. Now let's make sure that's gonna fly, Orville. I'm bumping just a little bit somewhere. I think it's that ridge in between. There we go. Now this gets fastened to the bench. Comes with screws, but we need to predrill. Now, for fastening, couple things. These deep-threaded screws that it came with are going into hard maple, so they're gonna bite in pretty good. Depending on the material your bench is made from, you might want to run holes all the way through and put a through bolt on this with a nut on the other side, and that'll just guarantee that the plate can't possibly pull loose. Very nice, easy to install, and provides great hold-down pressure here at your bench. I've got my vise ready here. Now, this is one I took off a older workbench. That's why it's got some miles on it. Little bit used, but still works great, and what I wanna do is get it mounted on the end of the bench here. I put this track in first because the location of the vise needs to be away from that track. Couple things have to happen. This bench is an inch and 3/4 thick. This shoulder or step here on the vise is more than that, so if all I did is bolt it to the bottom, about half of these jaws would be sticking up above the top of the bench, and that's no good, so what I did is put the vise on the bench upside down, just like this, got a piece of hardwood. This is a piece of hickory, and kept planing it until its thickness was just a little bit greater than the step here below the bench, so the result of that will be that the vise, when it's installed, is gonna be slightly below the top of the workbench, just less than 1/8 inch, little bit below the top of the bench, so now what I wanna do is locate the vise left and right, and what I'm checking by looking down here is just to make sure I'm clear of the bolts under this track system, and I'm clear of the bench system itself. Once we have that, then from above, I'm gonna mark the hole locations. Those things are so heavy there's just no way that you could lay this out from below. With the hole locations marked on the tabletop, I'm gonna clamp my spacer board on here so that it's flush with this face, and then we'll be able to drill the holes for the big carriage bolts. Just about ready to drill holes here, and let me talk you through what happened to get this far. The hickory block that I had made up previously, we talked about its thickness, its length and width are slightly greater than the size of the plate on the vise, about 1/2 inch bigger in both directions, so that gives me a little bit of wiggle room as far as locating it. What I did then was I put double-face tape on the top face of this hickory block, and when I put it onto the bottom of the table, I centered it left and right under my hole layout. The double-face tape is there so that after the holes are drilled, I can take the clamp off and the black is gonna stay while I put the bolts through and put the vise on from below, so it's gonna be one less thing to hold onto when I get to that step. When we drill, all we have to do is drill an oversize hole for the heads of the carriage bolts. You wanna do that first, then go back and drill all the way through for the body of the carriage bolt, so size a Forstner bit so that you're drilling larger than the head of the carriage, and to make sure we get in the right spot, I'm gonna eyeball the center on each of these holes. Now, what we wanna do is drill deeply enough that from the carriage bolt, the top of the dome to the bottom of this shoulder is our depth of cut, or depth of drill. Slightly more is okay. Slightly less is no good 'cause then the dome of the carriage bolt is gonna be higher than the workbench, so it'll take a little messing around on this first one, and I'll show you how to figure it out to see exactly where to stop. Once we can eyeball that on the Forstner bit, the next three will be a lot easier. Now, with the Forstner bit, put the carriage bolt in there upside down, and what I want is for this flat to be below the surface, and it's not yet. That's good there. It's just not even 1/16 of an inch below the surface, so now what I can do is look on the Forstner bit at where I stopped, and that'll give me a good idea, on the subsequent holes, of where I need to stop. Now, it's important that you do the Forstner bit first because if we had drilled this hole, I'm using 3/8 bolts, so I have a 3/8 bit, if we drill this one first, now we've got a 3/8-inch hole there, and it's about impossible to get this Forstner bit centered on that 3/8 hole. If we do the Forstner bit first, that leaves a lovely little dimple in the bottom of the hole, which is the perfect starting point for the 3/8 bit. These go all the way through. When it comes to picking the bolts, what I want there is a size that's robust. 3/8 is plenty, but I want it to be a little bit smaller than the hole that's in the vise, and the reason for that is that when I put everything together, if these holes were drilled just a little bit off of square, when I come out the bottom, the location at the bottom is gonna change a little bit, so by having a small bolt through that larger hole, it should be able to compensate for that so that we don't have a problem where the vise won't actually install. Now, that's standing proud. I'm not worried about that. That's just because the square part of the carriage bolt is not engaged down into the maple yet. Next thing we'll be able to do is get some wrenches and the rest of the hardware, and actually hang the vise below the tabletop. Okey-dokey, I'm gonna take my carriage bolts, and give them a whack-a-do, and just kind of seat them into that maple. Nice. Then, with this vise, it's pretty cool 'cause it weighs a ton, that the bolt holes on the back are U-shaped, so what that's gonna let me do is get a washer and a nut started just barely on these back two bolts, and then, what I should be able to do is scoot the vise in from underneath, hang it on those back bolts, and then add the front nuts and washers. All right, I'm gonna tap my front ones up just a little bit. They're interfering with what I'm trying to do. That's better. Now I'm on the back ones. I don't know if I mentioned the vise is heavy. If I get one more nut on here, it'll kind of hang there on its own. There, that nut's on, get this one on, and then, from here, it's simple. Grab a wrench, tighten up those nuts, draw the vise right up to the bottom of the benchtop, and you're all set with mounting a good quality vise on your workbench. Once you've got a vise on your bench, the next thing we wanna do is get pads on it so that we're protecting your woodworking stuff from the metal jaws, so I've got a pair of pads here. They're rabbeted on the ends. Don't sweat that yet. We're gonna talk about that, but you don't need to know about that at this moment. In order to put the pads on, we want the pad to be a little bit narrower than the height of the jaw and a little bit longer, about 1/2 inch per side longer. There are holes in the front jaw and holes in the back, so what I'll be doing on the backside is running screws through this jaw and actually into the bench. The screws that go through these holes do go into my benchtop or the block below, so I'm using pretty long screws for this pad because that does help hold the vise against the bench, provides a little bit of holding power, so what I wanna do now is on the back pad gonna put a piece of double-face tape on there, and my goal here is to find the hole locations, and the problem is, of course, once the pad is up against the back jaw, I can't see the holes anymore, so what I'm gonna do is put this the way it goes, this front toward me, center it even with the metal on top and centered left to right, push that against the metal jaw. Now the dealio is that the holes in the front jaw are in alignment with the holes in the back jaw, and that's pretty common, so when I close that, I can mark through the holes on the front. That results in layout marks on my pad, and that lets me predrill the pad. Let that cantilever out. Boy, it'd make you cry if the first thing you did was drill into your benchtop. I want that well countersunk so that there's no chance the metal head of that screw is gonna end up against some wooden thing that I put into my vise. These pads are also hickory, and hickory's not critical, but you wanna have some kind of hardwood. Now, when I exited on the back, I got just a little bit of a high spot there. That could interfere with the pad seating up against the metal, so I'm gonna just give that a little shot on the back with the countersink, and that'll knock that dimple right down. Now we have a bench that's made up right here of maple and hickory, so there's no way I can just drive those big screws in. I need to predrill. I'm gonna get the screws started out here 'cause they're really long, and I wanna make sure that I have enough room in between the jaws to get my driver in there. With those screws sticking out, I can check my index here, and see if it goes this way, which is the right way, or if I do this, the pad's sticking up, so I know that's not the right way. All right, nice and flush with the top. Now the other jaw's a whole lot easier. I'm gonna close this, align the jaws, and close it the rest of the way, so I'm checking across here, top of the wood, even with the top of the vise. Ends are lined up. That's all good. This one's easy. I'm just gonna run a couple of sheet metal screws in through the back. Sheet metal screws for two reasons. One, deep threads, so they're gonna get a really good bite into this hickory, and two, they have big pan heads on them, which will do a good job of holding against the metal vise here on the front. That takes care of the pad installation. Now here's the cool part. You cut these rabbets into these pads, and the reason you're gonna do that is so that you can make other custom jaw pads to go with these pads, so one of the things I've found is that I'm working on a guitar, and I don't wanna squeeze it wood to wood. I wanna have a piece of carpet, or maybe a router pad in there or something, so I'm taking the time to tuck that in. Then I'm holding the guitar, and I'm closing the vise. What I would do with these is cover this with a piece of carpet or a router pad by gluing it on. Then I can just slip this in place as needed, one on each jaw, and I can make custom pads for the vise depending on what I need to do, so here's the deal with how this works. Cut a rabbet the back of these pieces, obviously, before you put them on. This is 3/4-inch stock, so I made this rabbet to leave behind 5/16 of an inch here. It's 3/8 of an inch deep that way. Then what you need is a piece of molding, basically, that will capture that rabbet like this. This is gonna go on the end of your custom pads. This is made easiest by working with a wide piece. Cut this rabbet so that it fits this rabbet. After you've got it on two edges, then you can rip off a narrow strip like I have here. From that narrow strip, you can crosscut ends, then glue and brad the ends onto your pad, so then you can make a bunch of those up. I'd make half a dozen of them up, so 12 pieces, six pair at one time. Then you have them available as you need in order to make custom pads for the vise, so this is a great way to outfit it, and it's gonna really extend the life of the pad you have in here 'cause then, when you add these, you're less likely to mess up these. I wanna have a vise on this end of my bench, and I don't wanna spend the money on one, so this is all about a shop-made tail vise for your bench. It's gonna come from this little piece of pipe clamp right here, so got this at a home center with a 12-inch length of pipe, and we're gonna turn this into a vise. Works out really well. Here's what you need to do. I've got holes drilled here in this jaw. They need to be big enough for a #10 sheet metal screw to go through. I've also got holes drilled here in this jaw, same deal, big enough for a #10 sheet metal screw. This piece has a hole drilled in it. Now, what's gonna happen here is the pipe has to pass through there, but make it easy on yourself. It does not need to be a tight tolerance, so this is a 3/4-inch pipe. I'm using a 1 1/8-inch hole here. It's just gonna make assembly a whole lot easier. I made this block eight inches long. Here's where this whole thing is going. It's gonna get mounted underneath, just like this. Now, let's look up here so you can actually see what's going on. Once it's under there, this jaw's gonna be screwed to the back of it. The other component of the vise is gonna be able to slide in and out on the clutch system just like a quick-acting vise. Then we'll get this pad set up so that it fits on this end, the other jaw, the pipe clamp, and we'll have a vise here, so first thing I wanna do is get this installed on here. Then we'll be able to get this located so we can predrill for some big carriage bolts here. Got this pad screwed to the back of this block, and it doesn't take much of a screw 'cause all the tension's gonna be coming this way, so they're really just holding it in place. When I put that on, I centered the hole in the pad on the hole in the wood, just to give a lot of clearance for the pipe to move through. Now what I wanna do is get this configured or located on my bench, so I'm making it even with the outside, even with the front face, and of course, it's gonna get mounted on the bottom, but this is just to help me locate the bolt holes. That's what my block looks like. Now what I'm gonna do is measure, it's three inches from each side to the edge of the hole, so I'm gonna go half of that, 1 1/2. The block itself is an inch and 1/2 thick, half of that, 3/4, and two of those big carriage bolts is gonna be plenty for this, so second verse, same as the first. We'll start this with a punch to get the Forstner bit started, then drill with the Forstner bit till we have a recess for the head, chasing it all the way through with the 3/8 bit after this is clamped on from below. That secures the block and the back of the mechanism to the bench, so now this component can slip in. I made this pad so that it's the same width as the distance from the top of the bench to the bottom of this block, which ain't gonna work, so I held off on purpose because what I wanna do is close this up, get this aligned with the outside of the bench here, and then, underneath here, I'm gonna mark with my pencil right alongside the pipe. In other words, I have to create a relief here in this thing for the pipe to slide up into. I'm also gonna mark here where the top of the bench is on this 'cause that's gonna then show me how much this has to go down in order to work, so this will be pretty straightforward. Now, I'll use a square, and I'll bring these lines up and up. Now, you're not cutting to this point. You're taking this dimension and moving it down here, so I need to take 1 1/2 inches out of the bottom. Once I square these lines up, I'll cut that out on a band saw. All right, let's see how this worked. What I want is for this to go in here. I wanna be able to make it even with the top of the bench, even with this outside edge, and then I'm gonna close this, so if I can't hit those two numbers, if I can't get it far enough to the left to be flush out here, if I can't get it high enough to be flush here, then I'd go back to the band saw and nibble a little bit more out of there. Now, here on this pad, I want that to be vertical because I'm about to screw it to this pad, and I want them to be aligned. Okay, predrill couple of sheet metal screws, and Bob's your uncle. Now, let's go back and talk about this pad just a little bit more. Obviously, it's got holes in it. Eventually, there's gonna be a set of dog holes in this table, so these are 3/4-inch holes here, 3/4-inch hole here. So far, these mean nothing to you, but once we get couple steps down the road, these are gonna help us clamp stuff this way. Now, what's nice with this is I have quick action. If I release the clutch here under the table, I can pull this back to whatever size I want. I can push it in. With these sets, usually comes this little spring gizmo. This'll go on the threads here on the end of the pipe, and the nice thing with that is it's gonna prevent you from being able to just pull all of this pipe right out the table, so if you have the clearance under your bench, there's no reason why, if you needed it, this whole assembly couldn't be longer, but I went with a 12-inch pipe because, for what I use this kind of vise for, this is gonna work just fine for me, so that takes care of our shop-made tail vise here. Next thing I wanna do is get a line of dog holes in front of this vise. Remember, that's why the holes are in the top of that pad, so let's talk first about bench dogs. I got round dogs. These are sourced for you on a PDF on the DVD because I can easily drill a round hole in this and get the dogs to go in there. If I got square ones, it'd be really hard to make that work. What I wanna do is have a series of holes located on my benchtop equidistant from this edge, the edge in front of me. The equidistant part is gonna become important in a little bit 'cause you're gonna see an accessory that takes advantage of that. The distance from hole to hole is four inches, and I came up with that from the travel of my pipe clamp tail vise. In other words, the maximum movement on that thread is four inches, so that way I know that I can always tighten my material in up against the dogs, so the way to figure that out for yourself is just take your device, see how far it moves. That number is how far your holes have to be apart. What I did is I went to a drill press, and I drilled a 1-inch hole every four inches, four inches on center this way, so back to making this pad, the center hole is four inches in from the end. It's centered on that 8-inch block, so everything here'll play nice together when we're done. Now, what we're up against is we'd like these holes to go in accurately located and perpendicular to the table so that the dog can go straight up and down, and at a uniform depth, so here's my approach to this. First, let me clamp this pattern down. The nice thing about doing this, the pattern, on the drill press is that I can put a fence on the drill press and guarantee that the distance to each hole is the same off of this edge. I've got a block in my vise down there, and I butted against that block when I located it, so that tells me how far to go to the right and establish that four inch, and then I'm just feeling this, and I'm making sure that I'm even with the edge of the bench over here. The X's indicate my reference sides. To get my hole location set, I've got a V-bit in my router, so this is just gonna become a center point. I've got a guide bushing that's an inch in diameter 'cause I've got 1-inch holes in my template. What I'll do is set my depth of cut so that that V-bit is just gonna kiss the top of the wood. I'm gonna do that by setting the stop rod just a little bit above the turret there. If I cut in 1/16 of an inch, that's gonna be fine, just enough to leave a little dimple there, and we're set. There's our series of holes. Now, let's say you wanna go longer than this. The way that I would do that is with the router in hand, I would bring my pattern here, set the V-bit down so that the center is in that dimple. That's gonna index you to this last one that you punched. Then you can even this up with the edge of the bench and continue to your dog hole down there, so you don't need a template as long as your bench. A short one is fine. You just keep indexing as you go. Now what we're up against is drilling these holes and keeping the drill straight. The way that I'm gonna do this is with a shop-made guide block, so what I did was I went to my drill press, same bit, which is 3/4-inch diameter, in order for the dogs to fit in there. Drill this series of holes, more than one because one hole might wear out even though I'm doing this in oak, my guide block. If one wears out, I wanna have another one available. On the drill press, what I know is that I can drill a nice square hole because of the drill press table, so what I've done here with my drill bit is ran that all the way through, and then set the depth so that from the tip of the brad point to this point is just slightly greater than the distance from the shoulder to the bottom of the dog, so we're not going all the way through. It's a stopped hole. I set that using this stop collar right here. In this case, it's 1/2-inch stop collar on the 1/2-inch shank of the bit. It's not on the bit itself. You'd need a 3/4-inch stop collar for that. Here's how the whole system comes together. I want just a little bit of brad point sticking out 'cause that is gonna center me on this dimple, and I can feel it. Right there I'm in the right spot. Clamp this down, and then we're simply gonna drill holes until that collar hits that oak. Second verse, same as the first: bunch to go. I switched holes 'cause partway down I could feel the bit walking a little bit in that one, and I don't want that. I want a nice tight tolerance between the dog and the hole. That's the hardest part of the whole thing is just getting the center point of that bit right smack in the center of that dimple, but you can kind of feel it drop in there. I've got one dimple left, but I'm gonna leave that because I do wanna continue the series all the way to the end of the bench so I can use it for long stock, so this technique, with a good brad point bit, the router-based template that I used earlier, is a great, bulletproof way to put dog holes in your workbench and make sure that they're nice and straight up and down, and they're indexed correctly relative to each other and to the edge. If you want bench dog holes, but you're not really keen on the shop-made vise down here, here's an alternative. You can just buy this product, and we've got it sourced for you on the PDF. 3/4-inch holes for the dog, 3/4-inch hole for this. I can advance the threads, so this can go on the table like that, and then, once it's in there, I can turn that, use the handle this way to get it nice and tight. It's pretty cool. It's got holes in it, so if you wanted to, you could run screws through the back, put a wooden jaw on this, so this is a great solution, commercially made, to offering a lot of the capabilities that a vise like this would, to take advantage of bench dog holes in your workbench. Here's a problem I run into in my shop all the time, and that is I have a piece like this, 3/4-inch stock, and I wanna put edge banding on it. Maybe it's a shelf, and I wanna fasten a, basically, a one-by-two to the front of it to cover the plywood and to give it support, so I need to have it on edge, and I really need it to not tip over while I'm working on it, and it gets especially dicey as the pieces get wider, so a bench hanger is the perfect solution for this. Here's the way this'll work. That's gonna go there, hooked into the bench dog, another one just like it over there, hooked into the bench dog. My piece can go in between. It's slotted down here so I can raise that up and raise that up until it's just a little bit above my bench, so I can very easily work on it. Because it's slotted, I can adjust it to different widths of shelves, so it's a pretty handy thing to have. Now, let me walk you through the process. It's really, really simple. Got just a few components here. First off, we have the hanger itself, five inches wide. This dimension is gonna be determined by how far your dogs are set in, so mine are four inches on center from the edge, so my piece is six inches long. The hole that you drill here, of course, has to be the same size as the bench dog hole, and has to be correctly located so that the distance from this seam to that hole matches that distance. On the length of these parts, I made them 16 inches long, and that was just working with what do I normally do for shelves? How would I wanna use this? In other words, what's the widest shelf I'd ever wanna put in here, so again, five inches wide, 16 inches long, and then, right here down the center, I used a router table and a 3/8 straight bit to route a slot that my carriage bolt could travel in. That's what gives me adjustability. Up here on the top, it's glued and screwed together, so it's nice and rigid. Now this component, which is actually gonna hold my shelf in place, simple, again, but couple things going on here. Notice that this stock is thick. This is 7/8 of an inch thick. This is 3/4-inch plywood, and I did that on purpose so that when the shelves go in here, if I want to, I've got room in there to add something like a router pad, so I can put that in there, and of course it's gonna drape against the hanger too, then slide my shelf, and if I wanna protect it from the wooden components. The 3/8 inch hole here is drilled so that it's gonna match up with the 3/8 slot that's in this piece. This, I made five by five, which gives me plenty of bite, even on wider shelves, so this part works out really, really well to give us the adjustability that we need to hang stuff on edge on the workbench. Now, the other thing you run into is I don't want it to just hang there. I wanna work on it, so an example would be if I want to edge-plane a long board. Then, I need a way to grab onto it so that I can work on it, so these will also provide a solution for that. In order to be able to work on an edge, I need another shop-made component, and that's this, which is a stop block, so that's gonna go in that hole. The 3/4-inch dowel goes in there, same size as a bench dog, so it works just fine. In this case, I've got a horizontal piece identical to my other ones. I've got a vertical five-by-five. Then I've got a piece of hardwood fastened to the five-by-five that stands proud of it. It doesn't really matter too much how big it is, but it has to get past this 3/4-inch face. The reason is that the way this will work is I can put a part into my hangers, and then I can push it against that stop, so that's why we have to have something out here past this face, so it'll engage that edge. Now, depending on what you're doing, that might be enough right there. If you wanna go one step further, remember down here on our shop-made vise, this pad is honeycombed with 3/4-inch holes, so I can put a 3/4-inch dowel in there, get this vise in the right position so that this is gonna engage against the end of our material. The other end is against that stop block, and as I tighten this vise, it'll actually hold it in place. Then I can work really aggressively on it, so very simple. You can make these out of plywood scraps you probably got laying around in the scrap bin, but a great addition to your bench to allow you to work on edges like I've got set up here. When it comes to doing detail work at the workbench, my aging eyes often tell me there's not quite enough light. Need a little bit more. That's where this becomes a great solution. Got this sourced for you on the PDF on the DVD. Here's how this works. It's really just brilliant, pun intended. This component has a 3/4-inch rod on it. Guess where that goes. It's gonna drop right into the dog holes. Steel plate on top. Magnet on the bottom of the light. Very secure. I can put it in any one of the dog holes. Part of what this tells you is that if you like this as a solution, you're probably gonna want dog holes over closer to your other vise where you might be hand-cutting dovetails or doing other detail work like that, so this, which sheds a little light on our workbench, wraps up the DVD about how to add a very nice workbench to your shop. Now again, whether or not you want the adjustable ends, you got to admit there are a lot of cool details here, shop-made solutions that provide great accessories to make your workbench able to work a lot harder so that it can really help you out with your woodworking projects, so have fun making a workbench for yourself. Happy woodworking.