[Workbench] Mechanical Joints

The workbench I am currently building relies heavily upon mechanical joints. In other words, the joints themselves provide the strength, not glue nor screws. The term might be especially useful in this case because I ended up using machines to create bits of them (more below).

Here are some of the legs ready to receive the stretchers:

You can see from the number of cuts and shoulders that the layout was involved. Not to say difficult, but it took a few hours for all the members.

Here's the stretchers and rails, a bit simpler although the lower set are now also rabbeted to hold shelves. I would have cheated and tacked on a ledger for that, but it is not my design:

You can see that some of the joints are cut out, and some have the waste remaining. I did use a bandsaw to speed up the scoring process.

I also used this to trim many of the members:

Is Roubo spinning in his grave? I doubt it. He'd understand I have a deadline to meet. I also used a drill press for the mortises, although my test joints were made entirely by hand and came out a bit neater. Go figure.

P.S. - The first batch of Jim's tools have been photographed and as soon as I have the prices and descriptions written up, they'll be listed here.