What Workbench Timbers Should Look Like

These images are all courtesy of Jameel Abraham.

A month from now we will be convening the second French Oak Roubo Project wherein Jameel Abraham, Jeff Miller, Will Myers, Raney Nelson, and I will be helping a dozen participants to construct workbenches true to the vision of Roubo’s Plate 11.

The white oak timbers we will be using were harvested sixteen years ago following the infamous Christmas Day 1999 Ice Storm across Europe that felled hundreds of thousands of mature trees in French and German forests.  One amazing fact is that these trees were alive while Roubo was writing his treatise!

Another amazing thing about the timbers are that they are, well, amazing.  If I recall these have been slabbed at six inches thick, with widths up to almost three feet and lengths of more than twenty feet.  Yes, that is a real adult human next to the pile.

Yeah, we ought to be able to manage to get some decent benches from that.  Perhaps this winter I might even complete mine from theinitial workbench gathering two years ago.