 The birth of my samurai carpenter workbench Here small workshop guide as you are going to see in a second I have one more screw to put in and then my samurai carpenter workbench is 100% done. I've already bought some eye candy for it as far as some expensive jewelry and Hold fast and so forth and I'm ready to rock and roll using this thing Jesse a samurai carpenter probably about October of 2017 and after I saw that video he motivated me To think that as a total novice woodworker who didn't have any of this stuff That I could maybe build a workbench like this so I decided to go ahead and give it a go and In the meantime, I have not only built the workbench, but I've built out my complete garage and I have built a tremendous number of skills and Doing different things the way you build skills is by making mistakes and Learning from your mistakes So I am one of the fastest skill builders alive because I make more mistakes than anybody Play is now July of 2019. I started this just short of two years ago So I must also be the world's slowest woodworker But I got to tell you my concept of this was for it to be heirloom quality. I Being age 77 76 when I started this I wanted something that I could pass down to future generations and maybe they could remember the old man Now I started a company some 45 years ago and that did really well and now my two sons run that company and So that was nice and that was a creation, but that's not Physical nobody can see that and remember it. So I thought I'd do this. There's something physical Hopefully my future generations will actually use this get into woodworking somebody and look at this and say wow I can't believe that that old man started with no knowledge and built that This is a five foot version because I have a 200 square foot workshop And I don't have room for the seven foot version. So enjoy the video I'll do a voiceover explanation as we go. I Don't have some clips of some of the build One of the biggest problems of doing a build this nice is then being worrying about using it And so I think I'll just go ahead and get that issue out of the way by purposely doing a little bit of damage Right now, and then I don't have to lose any more sleep over that. So here. I'm kind of apologizing to my bench and now let's just Drill a couple holes in that black walnut and just get over that whole I got to take a little breath here Get over that whole process. Oh my god. Oh, I can't believe I'm doing this Man, oh man. Oh man. This hurts me more than it hurts you baby. All right, as you can see I didn't really do that. I wouldn't have the guts to do that I had a little false piece of wood on there. So my baby is still intact Let's start with the legs. So do a little dimensioning of the lumber purse. This is a red oak So cut it to width cut it to length Get ready to laminate the pieces together to make the thicker legs We'll glue up here Using a technique with a parallel clamp to hold these in place While we get the clamps going the other direction to put the pressure on it This was a constructed tenon instead of a cut tenon Meaning that the two outside pieces were put together Shorter than the middle piece and that left the tenon in the middle then have to trim them Since they're not going from side to side to tenon. They're actually a blind tenon with a cheek So putting the cheek on the tenon here a little trim up Where I couldn't get the blade to go all the way up. So then take the rest off with a chisel Good idea to stop and sharpen the chisels every once in a while when you're doing woodworking So now I'm trying a method here of using a template to carve out where the tenons are going to go in the feet and I thought it would be a good idea to Just get a nice square beginning to a mortise so I could then go to my Benchtop mortising machine and do more accuracy over there so carved it out with the router and then square off the edges with a nice chisel and then Go to the bench top mortiser and now I have some nice walls to register the bit against and get a nice clean cut So that's what I'm doing here The mortising and little vacuuming the little mortising the little vacuuming and then do that for all four of the feet now shaping the edges of the tenons To have them go in the feet better checking the feet for squareness Using my block plane to shape up the tenons a little bit more Constantly and I'm not going to show you everything in this video, but constantly doing trial fits and then Reshaping a little bit more trial fits reshapes if I want to get it nice and tight So here you can see it's so tight. It won't even go down in and of course when you add glue That's going to be more problematic So I mark where how far it would go down so I know where I need to work on and Then continue to work until I can get it to go in Even this trial fit here won't go all the way But I'm not going to bore you with all the details of fitting tenons. Otherwise, this would be a two-year video so in doing some of the mortises on the feet for the rails and styles I'm going to use the approach of it of a template now what I'm showing here is I actually stopped and did some Saw horses because that gave me some good practice at the things that I needed to do on the workbench these are the rails and you can see I routed a hole in it for the tray now, I'm fitting to see if everything's going to fit properly and marking where I will need to put my spike and Doing round off I use a little compass to give myself a nice semi circle here, I'm building a template for the spikes and Our wedges or whatever you want to call them Get that really nice and shape the way you want it and then use that to trace it onto your wood that way Everything will look exactly the same instead of having a bunch of random looking spikes Get those all marked out cut them on a band saw I'm not as respectful of the band saw at this point as I should have been but later I almost tried to take off the finger and Have a lot more respect for that puppy now than I used to so those shaping up with the sander Marking of where the mortise has got to go. It's got to be a tapered mortise and That's also going to go a little bit Inside of the line so that when I pound it in it will tighten up the the rail or the style And here's the Shelf that's going to go in down below all black walnut is pretty well cut to size, but it wasn't quite fitting Or wasn't quite the right size so a little bit of shaving on the end to try to get it to be perfect Trying to do a really nice bench top. The secret is That's good enough is not an acceptable term What you really need to do is continue to do things very very precisely Now even though I've got mortise is going all the way through the legs here I need to make a little slot in order to accommodate the tray or the shelf That's got to go in all the way around so not only do I have a slot in the rails and the styles but also in the legs So here's kind of a couple of the legs finished and the feet finished checking to see if they're sitting at 90 degrees or not and Pretty happy All right. We're got everything kind of cut with a lot of shaping and stuff that I didn't show you as far as cutting the profiles on the feet and and drilling some mortises for some spikes to go through or black walnut Square spikes similar to dowels Little dry fit here to see if things are going to go together. Well You got to do multiple multiple dry fits for something like this so that you can see Where you haven't done a good job yet and where you need to do more work in order to eliminate little gaps And I'm not going to try to remember where all the gaps were So what I do is I find the gaps and the things I need to fix and then I use blue tape to give myself a note So then when I pull it apart, I know what I'm doing So a little test fit without going all the way in with the spikes Actually, I think I did go all the way in to see how tightly it pulled together All right, so Continuing that process now. I need to get those square dowels to go all the way through the tenon so I've got a mark on the tenons that are sticking inside of the The legs here or where those dowels need to be mortised out So I thought the best way to do that was just to do a little chisel there to mark where that is I have to tell you I had a lot of trouble getting the square dowels to line up and stuff and so It might have been easier just to use a drill bit and use a circular dowels But I wanted to do this thing right so That's the sand all the components where you got them out Then trying to get it in all the little corners and stuff when you got it all assembled So I like to go through several grits to get it down to almost final stage and then wet it and raise the grain and then do the final grit now I Don't mind getting the base really smooth because it's But when it comes to the bench top, I don't want to get it super smooth I want it to have a little bit of roughness to it. So here's the final glue up of the base What you're gonna see here is I got part way through and then with adding the glue I couldn't get the tenons to go all the way through that one And and so you have to very quickly decide if it's gonna work or not and then I bailed out So I took it all apart cleaned it up re glued it Get a little bit more carving out and then tried to use a method I saw which is used gravity to to your advantage and so I Did it in a different way and it worked All right. Well, that's the base now on to the top for the top I'm using white eastern maple with a with a black walnut strip and just for a little desired accent. So Got that all together. Glavinated didn't bore you with all of that So now it's a question of the big tenons at the end of the tabletop There's there's two identical pieces that are going to get put into some end pieces And so I got to create the tenons of the right size. They're blind tenons. They're not overly critical I tried several different methods as you saw my preferred methods to the future will definitely be to use a large router All right, then I needed to cut some slots or some rectangles into the bottom of the tabletop in order to accommodate the vice screws And so my tabletop here is three inches thick and my varitas twin screw called for Having clearance at two inches. So I took an inch off And I had to do that obviously for the side screw in two different places In the second instance, I decided to use a template would be better than using all the bridges and and the edge guide and I like that the only I didn't like is the size of the bit I'm using here So it took me forever going back and forth with a I think a quarter inch uplift bit So in the future, I'll just use the larger bits to carve that out all right got the End pieces here. I've already cut the mortises for the tabletops You can see that that's the larger rectangle and then this is to accommodate the rod for the vices now both the end piece which is going to serve as the back of the vice and then the Front of the vice are put together here so that I can line the rod holes up exactly the same on both so Little force their bit to get As far down as I can the problem is that these are Three inches thick and that's a little difficult to get all the way down to that And so you do as much as you can and then there's a little hole done by the force there a bit and then you can drill down with a smaller drill so that you can then See where that little center hole needs to be when you do the the other side or when you do the Second piece the front the front vice jaw All right the tenons are triple tenon triple through wedge tenons So I need to cut a relief line and all three of those tenons and then drill at the base for relief And I actually was cutting all three tenons at once there so Again get everything sanded and stuff while it's in separate components and Here you can see the Two halves of the bench top plus the aprons with the triple tens on on each end So getting that puppy assembled with the help of my son Lots of clamps want to pull it together tight now This is probably the tenth time it's been assembled because I did many many many dry pits In order to try to eliminate a little gaps I even completely reworked the aprons because I just couldn't get things to work out well And I switched from red oak aprons to maple aprons and wow, I love maple a lot compared to red oak for certain things that Where you don't want tear out and things so we got the end piece on got pulled together. We're putting in the the wedges I cut the varieties the wrong way and they splintered on me and that turned out to be a terribly botched job. So I'm actually going to show you a little method that I use in order to Fix the completely horrible looking botch Tenons because I cut the wedges the wrong way Now the wedge through tenons are a major design element of the bench And so I just I'm not going to look at those done poorly for the Rest of my use of the bench and for my kids who inherit it. So here's the technique For fixing that whenever you're this far along and you're certainly not going to start the whole work bench over. So you And and these have been messed up a little bit even further. I didn't do this bad a job the bottom one's kind of a Good example of what turned out So Dig them out for about a half an inch or so You might want to use a forstner bit to get started on that and then use your chisels But get a nice clean Dig out and then get your walls perfectly rectangular. Doesn't even matter if they're a little bit larger now Just that they're perfectly rectangular Put together. I guess I call it a fault strip That's going to look like you wedged it. And so it's the a strip of the maple Walnut maple walnut maple in the right proportions Then take that strip after it's dried and to try to fit it into that half inch Mortise that you've made and sand it taper it sand it taper it sand it taper it Until you get a nice dry fit and again taper the Edge that's going in so that it's wider the more you pound it in and then it'll compress the edges Of the mortise and be really nice looking so I'm sure a lot of people have used this process. I kind of came up with it in my own mind, but It it worked and it worked beautifully. All right I need a place for the bench top to fit down over the legs And so the design called for here is for about a half an inch of depth as a slot and so this is Best way I could figure out to basically get that worked on so a lot of chiseling a lot of Work there with the drill a lot of chiseling and now our grandson and I are trying to get it to fit and You know, I want those to be tight. I don't want it to move around So in fact, it wouldn't fit all the way down. We figured out which leg Was the problem and so do a little bit more chiseling make a phone call and then we got that on there All right now I need to flatten it so to flatten it I made up a sled a three-quarter inch plywood You got uh, I've got a video all about how to do that Use the technique using some strings to line up the two Sacrificial boards that are along the edge of the workbench And then just use that router sled to slide along. I should have put a couple of little Pieces of wood on the anvil from sliding back and forth When it comes to uh, some other flaws, you're not going to do a perfect job So here I I used a little technique to get dramatic And replace some little tearouts and things I tried one fix and as you could see it didn't work at all. It was absolutely horrible And so and there it is. So that doesn't look good That doesn't look good wrong grain pattern and and you got a little tear out there So time to pull out the big boy and get more dramatic So I brought out the router with a nice bit in it Carved out a dramatic new section where all the flaws are being eliminated And sent to the trash bin Make sure everything's nice and square if it's not go ahead and enlarge it Cut a little bit bigger. You can see I got a little mistake right here Where it's not square. So just do some more Get that to be perfectly squared then fit your Your design piece or new piece to go in there Come um taper that so when you pound it in it compresses the wood again Clean up the glue cut off the end and voila You have turned an ugly flaw into a enhanced design Well, I gotta do keep a little bit of symmetry So I did that on the other end as well I decided not to do it on all four ends Because I wanted to have a little design Character to it Use my uh block plane to get those I left those oversized on purpose Last thing you want to do is have that be below the surface So take it down to the surface now with the block plane and sanding a different grits Wet it up see how it looks and I'm pretty pleased with that I even got it going a little bit into that end piece as you can see here Now I need a strip for the center This strip is used to hold tools and also to serve as a brace for planing. So it's a Kind of a unique design. I like it So I've got my compound mortar sled mines on a Tool or a base that where the ends will fold up and support the pieces Cut them on the table saw This is a black maple Black maple. I'm sorry. This is black walnut It was a little bit bowed and so I'm not I'm not having a lot of success with my jointer. So I used a method of Using a big sled on the thickness planer with some shims Underneath the areas where they need to be and then I jointed that because I Had it at an over thickness. So I had room to do some thickness planing All right, then I got to cut some little pieces that are going to separate the two long pieces of the center divider And so cut those precisely using my cross cut sled Get that all put away And let's get to the glue up Let's get to the glue up, Paul. Let's go to the glue up, Paul There you go So I get those center dividers support pieces Glued up those of course move all over the place while you're trying to do it I used a actually used a little salt in order to help hold those a little steady All right get that drying up change the next day change to the dado stack so that I can cut some Places to accommodate the legs make sure that my In this case, miter gauge support piece is a square 90 degrees And then set my height with a little device so I think it's from Wiley And then we're going to put some Dados or slots into one side of this center divider so that that will fit down over the legs In the middle and then if you want it to sit up Then you turn it over so that nothing fits over the legs and then it's higher So here we got it all put together except for the top piece And then we're going to get that glued on there Lots and lots and lots of clamps over time. I'm not going to show you all of that letter dry up and Eventually on to the next tip All right, so I've got that in there. I cut it. I purposely left it too tall Because I wanted it to be precisely The same height as my workbench when it's down over the legs So my workbench is flat at this point So I can just put a couple of flat pieces of wood on there to run the router base on and then drop the Plunge down to where it's just going to top I hit the top of my base and then gradually Take down the centerpiece So that it's essentially level With my table top now I don't go all the way to level because then I come back and do some Planing and fine-tuning and card scrapers and stuff to get it As perfect as I can get it. So here I'm taking off some of the excess that was left by the router and Got my centerpiece pretty well Ready to do some more stuff to it. Well, the centerpiece is supposed to have some slots in it So I'm going to drill a hole and then put a pattern bit down into the centerpiece find that wall with the pattern bit and then carve out Some nice little slots to hold old tools and and For various other things now that this centerpiece is not going to be glued in it can be totally removed So that you can use clamps from the inside A half of your bench so you can It's pretty pretty cool design. I'm very happy with it So here I go carving along with a pattern bit and Don't know if this ever happened to you But right now what's going to happen on this last and final slot right before we get it done perfectly and Is the dang rollers going to come off and so no longer do I have anything to find the wall? Now I always can hear the difference, but I'm not always smart enough to Go ahead and stop. I guess I'm an optimist Hoping that things are still working. All right, but look Low on bill. There you go. No longer any roller on the tip of that bit And you can see that I have carved out a larger hole Well, I just decided, you know what one larger hole is okay. It's actually qualitative design. So I just Went to work with the chisels and stuff and and got that larger hole to look all perfect like it was done on purpose All right, now I want it to be exactly flat The last thing I want to do is have any little sticking up ridge That's going to catch work pieces and stuff when I don't want it to If I want it this centerpiece to catch work pieces Then I turn it over and it'll stick up five eighths of an inch and serve as a nice bridge to brace things against for doing Some work with my hand planes so it's going along here with card scrapers Vents planes various methods to get just that last little piece using Use a straight edge or square here to run it along the bench to see if the edge of it runs into the center divider not and Get her all down to where she's uh the way I want it Next comes the installation of the Veracost twin screw vices. So I have to have a front Jaw for that the end piece on the workbench serves as the back jaw Get two pieces down to the right Of thickness a little artistic shot there of my dust collection pulling out some chips from the thickness planer and then get those Two jaws one for the side one for the end laminated together Put got those installed for the twin vices not gonna bore you with all that used my scrub plane. I have a designed this or You know worked on the blade of this so that it takes off a humongous bite of wood because I had to go down a good A quarter of an inch or more to get I purposely left my vice jaw Oversize so that I can then bring it down to the exact You know level of the back jaw or the end piece and so did the end End down the size and then did the side vise down the size and now I purposely left my pieces too long as well Always find it's better to do things and leave them too long and then cut them down and sand them down Then it is to try to put a glue a piece of wood back on because you undercut it So you never know exactly how these things are going to fit. So leave yourself a little room for air and then get rid of the air So use a variety of methods to try to get that down the sides all right, I had certainly used Some finish on the base a long time ago because that was finished a couple of months ago And so now I kind of cleaned that all up and wiped it Wiped down and did my final sanding but not to I think I stopped at 80 grit just to rough up my bench because I wanted it to hold things on it when I'm working so Now I'm putting on a mixture of 50% boiled linseed oil and 50% thinner and so put that everywhere including on the bottom side of the Workbench top because you want it protected from a gathering moisture as well We don't have much moisture in northern california I see how you guys working in your hot hot Garages or your coal garages. Yeah, our temperature is horrible. It ranges from 65 to 68 and our humidity ranges from 50 to 60 It's just horrible All right, uh, this is the drill. I'm using a dwd 220 quarter drill in order to do my bench dog holes So I tried a lot of different techniques Uh Really was worried about screwing up my holes right here at the end of this entire build I through all of my practice. I determined that this was my best method So I used that uh, that wood owls three-quarter inch wood owl With a little threaded end on the piece of it that pulls it down by itself The secret here is that not go too fast let the drill work by itself at a fairly slow speed And then when that little thread pops out the other side Instead of doing tear out It just stops if you're not pressing hard So I just let the drill pull itself down get that to get to the end And then I don't get any tear out on the underside. I have a very little hole That hole tells me to where to drill When I then go from the bottom so just go really easy And uh in order to get things at 98 degrees I just took a nice thick block of redwood and I went over to the drill press and I drilled myself some three-quarter inch holes with porcelain bits and Actually, I think I use regular bit and uh, so That that block served to get my drill pretty darn upright at 90 degrees Uh, you got a little it's not all the way through now So because it stopped and so put that same Drill bit on On a hand drill and then go in from underneath actually I used a different drill here and uh, basically go in from the holes from the underside And then that created a little roughness so back all through my holes that clean them up and uh Really really really like the way that those dog holes came out Well, what's the last piece of the puzzle that is to do some nice black walnut covers for the veritas twin screw vices Uh, you don't want to go to so much effort on a bench like this and then use those metal covers Probably shouldn't have bought them in the first place, but Anyway, so I tried this once kind of free hand with stuff. It looked awful So I uh, not afraid to take things off and completely do them again this time I used Did a lot of work on a pieces of paper to get myself a really nice pattern Then I traced that pattern on to my first piece of wood I did some rough cutting. You can see I do a lot of relief cuts in order to Do cutting on the bandsaw Trying to cut my finger off on the bandsaw during this process as you can see that big wrapping there a little trip to the emergency room a little suturing and brace and now I'm in the stage of getting back to normal So anyway working on my first piece trying to get it perfect and so a little Various files and sanding and things and so now it's essentially going to be a template for the other pieces The four pieces that go around the chain are one and one eighth in thickness so that they Chain fits totally inside of it and then for the outside part are going to have these end pieces that are half an inch in width So here I'm tracing the pattern onto the other three that I'm going to make And then that's going to go over a one quarter inch hobby board that I got from Home Depot rather than trying to thin down to a quarter inch on my equipment so working on these Used a router with a round over bit. I wanted to get all of these end pieces to have a nice round over edge on them so put those in my new workbench in my new vices and Man, I'm going to love using this workbench So do those roundovers I've got my new tenon jig. So I I've got to cut a little end piece of those end pieces So that it will fit over that one quarter inch hobby board So I uh used did that on my tenon jig and then I had to do a little fine tuning with chisels and things As I would try to dry to dry fit them onto that board. That's just to the right there So got that all worked out sanded everything down Using uh, I use 60 grit 80 grit 120 grit and then 220 grit and then I wet things down before I do the 220 so let's Raise the grain so here. I'm figuring out where I want to put the screws for the plate that's covering the chains This is the quarter inch hobby board from home depot black walnut So get those attached Properly spaced out and proper length Quite a few efforts went into dry fitting the end pieces to this to figure out how long these should be All right, then on those covers They needed to have a little bit of a circle in them To complete the circle that was done on the end pieces The end pieces themselves had a circle cut out using a two inch hole saw on the on the drill press And then this is just to match the rest of that Well, here's everything installed a couple close-ups to hopefully you can get a good idea of how these fit together Again in summary the have the outside edges over the chains which are one and one a In thickness and then you have the one-quarter inch plate covering the chains and then you have the end pieces which are a half an inch for most of But then with a cut out to go over the one quarter insert plate Now let me ask you this which do you like better on an heirloom quality bench these metal plates from baritoss? Or do you perhaps prefer these custom Plates using real wood Well, let's go to some pictures to finish up here. This is a very long video if you've watched this far You're probably going to build this puppy and I highly encourage you to do so so Enjoy the build and You'll find it challenging and you'll find it so Satisfying and so rewarding Be safe in your workshop Small workshop guy signing off