 Building the Samurai Carpenter Workbench. Part one, the bench top. I decided to do a workbench that would stress my woodworking abilities and teach me a lot of new things. I ran across Samurai Carpenter workbench video and was just enthralled. I thought no way in the world I can do that but I think I'm going to give it a try. It certainly will be a learning experience. If I can do it and if it comes out right, it will be essentially heirloom quality meaning that I can pass it on to my son or one of my grandsons. So I'm looking forward to it for a lot of different reasons. So this is part one is about doing the bench top. And if you're on this adventure let me know in the comments below and happy woodworking. Here I thought I would show you the workbench top and the aprons and the legs and the base in their fairly rough form. I'm trying to get everything cut to size before I take on the mortise and tenon work. This whole thing will be put together with mortise and tenon. So this I think I said earlier birch but this is all white maple and then black walnut for the ends and then the legs and base and other trestles are all red oak. The black walnut and pieces will have two tenons going partway through them and then six through tenons with little splits being used as well. So it's gonna be an adventure. So making some progress here I've purchased some eight quarters and some six. The woods are gonna be white maple, red oak and black walnut. And now I'm cutting them, ripping them to just over four and a quarter inches so that they're gonna become four inches later and I will want to be able to run them through the thickness planer after they get laminated. So there's the black walnut. Then cross cutting to approximate size. Never try to use the miter to cross cut exactly. Running things through the jointer in order to make sure I have a flat face and a flat edge on everything. And then spoofing things off and milling them down through the thickness planer to get them to approximate sizes. Again oversized so that I can then laminate and then run them through the thickness planer to final size. The barrel filled up really really quickly I was surprised by using the thickness planer so you got to watch that barrel. I laminated things together and then I plane or excuse me I use my bench planes to get one side flat so that I could run it through the thickness planer. Then I'm cutting tenons so I just use my circular saw to cut across nowhere near the actual final line. I'll fine tune that with chisels and shoulder planes and my rabbit plane so that's what I'm doing here is getting it down smoothed out and down to size. I wanted to try several different methods of cutting these tenons so here's a second method where I'm kind of doing cuts through the waist area again nowhere near my final line and then I'm going to turn the circular saw the other way and cut across again nowhere near my final line. I want to leave my tenons oversized so that if I happen to cut my mortises too big my tenons can still fit snugly. Here's another method of using my plunge router to cut the tenon down to approximate size again oversized so I can cut it down again later. I even wanted to experiment with my bench plane or my bench router sorry and then finally decided the best way was the plunge router and that's the way I'm going to go do these things in the future although I'm going to go a little bit more effort to set up more boards around my workpiece to stabilize the router so it won't tip in a direction. Now I had to cut off the some area off the ends because my tenon doesn't go from side to side so I just use a Japanese saw to do that as you can see. Nothing magical about that process and that is then I'm again running some boards through to get them these are now the red oak for the for the legs so I'm going to take a various a quarter and four quarter excuse me six quarter red oaks and mill them down to size one and a quarter one and a half and then laminate them together and then cut them down to final size so I have laminated my red oak together now I need to get some actually I'm cutting them down to final final size which I do on the table saw cross cut sled this is the Stumpy Nugz mega cross cut sled and I what I'm doing first is just getting a clean cut on one side and then I will use that side to get a clean cross cut at the exact measurements that I want on the other side so that's what I'm doing here I'm going to finish cutting these to exact size and then I'm going to run them through the thickness planar to get them down to where they really match up well with each other so that I can then start a lamination so I'll let you enjoy the music for a few seconds and then we'll come back and talk about a special technique during the glue up this particular piece is going to end up being a four by four leg I've got to do four of them obviously plus two bases so all of those end up being four by four well I'm not gonna buy four by four stock so I take the I get the smaller hardwood I mill it to what I need in this case I'm going to have an inch and a quarter inch and a quarter inch and a half put that all together two of them are on the outside are going to be 27 inches the one in the middle is the inch and a half is 30 inches so therefore I'm going to have a three inch tenon on the end it is going to have to be cut on the edges so that it's the right dimension in that in that perspective so anyway this is about gluing up technique I fast forward through the actual glue up there's nothing magical about putting glue on some boards and so watch the fast forward and we'll meet you back to show you what the actual technique is okay now here's the problem when you get these old loot glue all over them and you try to put them together and you try to clamp them they squirt around they move and that makes it difficult to get them lined up perfectly so here's the technique turn them over this way panel clamp get quite a bit of glue on there I'm not a fan of using a wet rag but middle mistake there all that probably did now was put glue right there so grab that panel clamp put it to open the jaws put it around your board that the jaw slows down bring it up onto your work table and start to tighten it a little bit what you're doing is tightening aligning at least on the bottom the boards and now things aren't sliding around you can adjust them to get them right where you want them tighten that down a little bit more so that's the trick right there using your panel clamp that's not what's going to hold it we need the glue pressure to be this way so now we're going to come in and use our clamps that are going to put the pressure in the direction that it needs to be in order to get some squeeze out here I'm moving the panel clamp further and further down the workpiece and then putting on my little Bessie 4 inch clamps for the squeeze out turning it over and putting clamps on the other side over doing the pressure so as to dent the workpiece okay I purposely cut the 227 inch side pieces long so that I could then bring them down to exactly the size I need the damage you see on the tongue is from the thickness planer snipe but that's going to get cut off so it's no problem here I'm using my low-angle block rabbit plane and chisel to again try to get that tongue down to precisely three inches for my mortise and tenon it was a lot more work than I anticipated particularly when I had to do it for four different legs now I've moved to where I'm going to cut off the very edges of the tenons because they don't go from edge to edge and so I'm using my stumpy nubs mega crosscut sled with the tenon jig that is part of that design and first time I really used it in production and I'm very very happy with the way that it worked so once I got it set up precisely then I can put in all four legs on two sides each or do eight cuts and get my eight tenons only problem is I could not raise the blade high enough to get all the way up to the shoulder so I have to do a little trim up what I'm done with this now I'm for the piece that I could not do with the blade the other way now I'm just running the blade underneath to get the rest of the tenon I've got my regular blade on there set in my flat top blade so I will have to come back and trim up with a chisel we're working on the legs to the samurai carpenter workbench we're working on the tenons we're able to cut using our jig our tenon jig on our table saw we have a stubby nubs crosscut mega sled and then a jig for that for cutting tenons but I was only able to go up a certain distance because of the thickness of the crosscut sled so and then I had a little section I had to finish off a little over a half an inch and very little depth about an eighth of an inch we're gonna cut we're gonna do some design shaping to this base and then we're gonna cut the mortise in here to receive this this tenon that'll give me my two bases and my four legs we're gonna have some through tenons with a wedge going in them if you if you've seen the samurai carpenter design so we're having fun working on it thank goodness for all these mortises I did go ahead by a powermatic bench top mortise machine and so I'm looking forward to doing a lot of practice before I work on my real wood coming along maybe someday we'll actually finish it small workshop guy working on a samurai workbench signing off