Workbench Wednesday – #16 (2018) Full-Size Laminated Roubo, Part 2

With the top made and soon flattened it was time to turn my attentions to the legs, leg vise, and planning stop.

I built the legs from the stock prepared and thicknessed the same as the top laminae to assure perfect fits of the leg joints.  The only real “craftsmanship” involved was cutting the dovetailed tenons on the face of the leg top.

For the leg vise I recycled an old wooden screw leg vise I had in my inventory, I often buy old wooden vise screws to keep around precisely for moments like these.  I inset the screw nut into the verso of the front left leg.

Before long the completed base was up on its feet, or in this case, upside-down on its feet, after first trimming the legs to length and removing the superfluous projecting center “tenon” from the bottom, an artifact of the original assembly concept.

The final task was to make and install a planing stop, which was itself a modified version of the traditional Roubo projecting stop.  I added a serrated-edge steel plate to the top of the stop to bite hard into the workpiece.

And with that the bench was complete, I think with about 40 hours of work in it.  It worked well for my presentation at Colonial Williamsburg, and now resides in the classroom of the barn.

With really only one more “looking backwards” workbench to showcase on Workbench Wednesdays, the feature will become even more irregular as it will occur only to chronicle new benches, of which there are four in the works.

Stay tuned