[Workbench] Laminating Beams and a Little Something Extra

The workbench top is coming together, literally. All the boards have been glued into groups of 2 and then 4. Those four are now joined into roughly 12" wide groups of 8. One more glue up and planing and the top will be complete.

To get the beams to fit nicely together, I had to do some jointing. I lack a power jointer, and would have used it in this case. Instead, I had to figure out how to plane these long beams since they would not fit on my current bench. The simplest answer I could come up with was to clamp the other beams together, creating enough mass to hold still, and then use that resulting hunk as the workbench. That's what it is, after all! I nailed on a simple planing stop, and this worked perfectly.

I've been really enjoying this wooden jointer plane, and that is what I used for these:

The resulting beams were square and ready to be glued up into superbeams. One is dry, the other is in clamps still. Needless to say, they are quite heavy and I am not sure if I will try to run them through the power planer or not. I will be finishing them by hand regardless.

While the glue was setting, I started to think about the rest of the construction of the bench, and even did a practice run, ironing out a lot of the kinks in my understanding. Here is the result:

The vise is wholly functional, but it definitely needs a new handle. I will also admit that there is only one hole in the parallel guide, since I do not anticipate adjusting the capacity all that often. The vise is otherwise a pretty faithful version of the common leg vise. The guide is pegged into a mortise in the chop. The holdfasts are also functional, but not as finely made as the others I use. These were fine finish cut nails in another life.

Yes, I even pegged the tenons. I did not go so far as to drawbore them, but I did create pegs from toothpicks and they improved the rigidity greatly: