Workbench Wednesday – #9 (2013/1890?) A Pale Imitation of H.O. Studley

By 2013 the Henry Studley Express was roaring down the rails, building steam and speed with every day.  I was  driving on long trips to visit the original collection, other examples of similar benches and vises, and compiling research apace.  I was almost at the saturation point when, on my birthday, I was contacted by a professor of furniture design who had a piano makers’ workbench that had outlived its usefulness for his work and he was considering selling it.  That made for a very fine birthday!  He had purchased the bench at a “going out of business” liquidation sale at a piano factory in the early 80s.  From what he said, he thought the factory had been there since the 1890s.  For years he had worked in designing hand-made furniture but in recent projects he was gravitating towards machine-made/manufactured furniture so his shop was transitioning to reflect these new interests.

We engaged in several rounds of correspondence as the portrait of the bench was clarified, and my interest in it grew by leaps and bounds.  Eventually we arrived at a sale price we could live with.  Three months after our first conversation I made the trek to upstate New York and picked it up.  The drive home was so filled with delight and anticipation that it seemed to take a week to get there, but in reality it was not even a particularly long day of driving.

The bench was a modular unit; take off the vises and separate the base from the top and it was a manageable move by myself using a hand truck.  In just a few minutes after arriving home it was ensconced in the barn.

Studying the disassembled bench confirmed my premise that for the most part it was a manufactured work station, probably through the catalog from an unidentified industrial supplier.  The base was a run of the mill cabinet that was cranked out for industrial and educational institutions by the tens of thousands, to be paired with a bench top of the buyer’s choice.  Did the options include vises? I do not know.  The top gives every indication of the same context, but is unmarked regarding its manufacturer.

Further, my investigation only heightened the mystery  about piano makers’ vises; this pair, like all the others I have seen, was devoid of any manufacturer’s identifying marks.  They were a pretty standard pair for this type of ensemble — a typical face vise that opens 15 inches and an end vise with an integral dog.

The bench has clearly had a lifetime of very hard use and was/is in dire need of a thorough restoration.  That remains on the menu for this winter. But then, it was on the menu for last winter, too.  At this point my goal is to install a new work surface on top of the well-worn extant one, getting the vises polished and perhaps plated (I located a nickel plating shop in Richmond, and Studley’s vises were nickel plated, so as an homage I must also, mustn’t I?) and making new bench dogs for those that are missing.  I wonder what the odds are that the new dogs will be spring-loaded ebony blocks.

For now the bench serves well for students in the classroom but after the restoration I suspect it might get moved.