Finding a French-style workbench with a twin-screw vise is somewhat uncommon. And so what furniture maker Nick Webb stumbled upon on the Mediterranean island of Gozo is even more unusual. The bench is in the carpenter’s shop of the Ta’ Kola Windmill, an 18th-century structure on the island. The bones of the bench are fairly … Read more
This summer I have made two changes to my Roubo-style workbench that I built in 2005 that have made the bench even more effective and easy to use. First up, a real-deal antique French holdfast, sent to me by a colleague in France. Clearly blacksmith made, this holdfast is sized somewhere between the monster holdfast … Read more
No matter how many times I do it, every class on building a workbench is remarkably different. Different wood. Different tools. Different students. Different country. I don’t know how I got talked into teaching a workbench class at a hand-tool school in Germany. OK, that’s a lie. I know exactly how. I was drinking beer … Read more
Assembling workbenches in the old-school manner is a nail-biter. If the drawbores are too close together, then you drive the peg in and nothing happens. The tenon isn’t pulled into the mortise. You start looking around for your framing nailer. If the drawbores are too far apart, you drive the peg in and it explodes … Read more
Talking about the motivation for building a French-style handwork bench using lots of power tools is always a discussion that feels like a hall of mirrors. Many of the 16 students in my workbench class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking aren’t infatuated by the gorgeous machinery the school offers. They don’t seem impressed … Read more
When it comes to building furniture in my shop at home, I have zero desire for industrial-grade machinery. But when I need to get a class of students at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking to get 17 benches completely built in five days, I embrace the large-scale noisy stuff. Some might call it selling … Read more
It is unwise to rush when installing vises on a workbench. So I stopped whipping the maggots students during the last two days of the class and encouraged them to work at their own pace. Some slowed down, but some stayed at the fevered pitch established in the first four days of the class. In … Read more
