Ash Workbench for the Basement Woodshop

The finished bench

This is the workbench I built to protect me from going insane.

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I will be updating this post to better describe the bench soon!

Well, it is part of a larger effort to allow me to continue my woodworking hobby during the colder half of the year. My main woodshop is in an old hay barn that barely provides any protection from the elements outside of having a roof over my head. I live in Sweden, where we do get actual winters, so there are a lot of aspects of fine woodworking that get pretty hard if you're not in a climate controlled environment.

I don't currently have any plans on making plans for this bench, at least as of yet. But I am posting some images here with the general dimensions.

I am considering updating my CAD model to reflect the design changes and fixes I made during the build, but that is a fair bit of work to do. I don't want to make my initial CAD model available, since it does contain design flaws that for example make the tail vise completely impossible to mount.

Putting together the top

I made a four part video series on YouTube documenting this build. In the first video, I put together the main top of the bench

Vises

After that I continued with making the vises as well as the integrated strip of bench dogs. Figuring out the tail vise was quite the challenge and when applying the CAD design to reality I had to rethink the construction of the tail vise.

Leg assembly

I went with a tension rod system. I embedded threaded rods into the stretchers of the leg assembly. When these are tightened, from outside the legs, this makes the leg assembly really rigid, with very high resistance to racking forces.

And finally, here is the full playlist for this build series on YouTube, in case you're interested.