Final Project Post

[Kevmc]

Final Project Post

I am now completely finished with my Roubo Workbench and it was an awesome learning experience and while I am really glad its finished, I am going to miss the Friday video release and the challenge of squeezing in time during the week to keep mostly on schedule to finish the build. I learned a lot during the build

1. My fence on my jointer/planer is not nearly as square as it should be and is easily knocked out of square when adjusting it. I need to always double check. Once I figured that out, wood prep was a lot easier
   
2. Wood selection is critical. I ordered my stock from a local mill in 12 foot lengths and in my infinite wisdom asked them to plane them down to 1 ¾ figuring it would save me some time. It did to some degree but when I went to use the 4-foot cutoffs for the base, I realized that by the time I glued them up and rejointed them etc. they would be less than the desired width so I ended up buying more wood. In fact I may win the prize for buying the most wood for the project. I think I ended up with roughly 260 board feet. Some of that is because of my multiple screw-ups on the end block but a lot of that is due to boards that were 8 or 9 inches in width. All is not lost however as I am going to use that wood to build cabinet doors and trim for a small cabinet project I am going to start so it wont go to waste.
   
3. A Mortising chisel works much better than a bench chisel for cleaning up mortises. Also, I learned that my chiseling skills, while much improved over the course of the project still need a lot of practice
   
4. I must remember to measure three times before cutting. My measurements for the dog holes were a bit off and it almost caused me a serious problem with the base unit. Luckily I somehow managed to think of this before cutting the long stretchers. When I checked the position of the dog holes, I had to shorten the long stretcher a bit and was very lucky that the position of the two dog holes around the right front leg worked out
   
5. I gave my festool 1400 router a real workout and learned a lot about how to use all the attachments etc. I really like that router
   
6. My addiction festools may soon be surpassed by an addiction to Lie Nelson and other high quality hand tools. I purchased a No 7 jointer plane and a rabbeting plane and I really enjoyed using them on the project. I was really happily that my top was relatively flat after shimming one corner of one slab and it took only 20 minutes of planning to get it darn close to deadflat with the No. 7.
   
7. Drawboring is an awesome jointery technique and I will probably use that in a lot more projects
   
8. Definitely learned that soft maple was the way to go. I toyed around with hard maple thinking it wouldn’t be that much harder but even making dowels out of extra hard hickory proved to me that making such a large project out of a very hard wood would have been an even more serious and tiring project
   
9. Benchcrafted makes awesome hardware and is a top-notch operation.
   
10. The guild is a great concept and has really increased my woodworking skills. I had purchased the plans for the roubo almost 2 years ago but had a hard time getting motivated to start the project so when I saw the next guild project I knew it was time to sign up and get going. There were so many different techniques I learned from the videos that I would not have thought about during the project and while I am sure I could have finished the project without the guild build, I am also certain it would have taken me a lot longer and I would have had countless more screw ups
    

I really appreciate all the help from the Woodtalk online community and the great ideas everyone shared. Marc, definitely props to you for cranking out high quality instructional videos, especially with the new baby and all that crazy DDOS crap you had to deal with. Cant wait to move on to the next guild build what ever it is.

KC

Overall Bench

Leg vice and deadman. This is the first time I have worked with Paduak and it it a great wood to work with. Machines fairly easy although I did have some trouble with one of my glue ups for the leg vice chop and it does have a tendency for tearout

Top with Paduak dog strip.

I had some free time this weekend so I also threw together a moxon vice. This vice is awesome and I highly recommend it to anyone

The holdfasts also are superb at holding down wood. A quick tap with the other hold fast and even with one holdfast its very hard to move the moxon vice. then a quick tap and the holdfast slides out.

[fransikaner]

Great job, KC. Thanks for sharing both photos and insights. The Moxon looks sweet.

[Vic]

Congrats on the happy ending!! Great job on the bench. I echo your sentiments regarding the Guild. It's been an absolute joy to watch Marc (and Nicole) build this magnificent community up and see him develop not only his skills in woodworking and videography, but the most noble of all skills, teaching! He does it very well!

(null)

[konkers]

Very nice Kevin. You've definitely lapped me. I'm just finished my leg joinery.