When last I reported on the workbench, I’d flipped it right side up, applied some finish, and drilled the dog holes.

My next step was to install the shelf boards. Like everything else in the bench, they’re made up of 1¼" boards. The only trick was to notch out two boards to fit around the legs, which wasn’t too tough.

I didn’t bother to screw them into cleats. I suspect gravity will keep them in place just fine. (The cleats, not pictured, are glued and screwed into the stretchers. They’re the only metal in the workbench outside of the vise hardware.)

Speaking of the vise, that was the last big project.

I’d picked up Benchcrafted’s Classic Leg Vise. It consists of two pieces of cast iron that support the weight of the vise chop (jaw), and a big ‘ol screw that moves it in and out. If that doesn’t make any sense, head over to the Benchcrafted site – the pictures and videos there make it pretty obvious.

Now, when making a vise, you have some flexibility around the look of the chop (the part that moves). The book shows this design:

Being something of a rule follower, this is what I set out to build. There are, no doubt, easier designs to make, but I thought this one looked nice. The book also mentioned “maple” and “8/4 boards.” So, I dutifully headed to the lumberyard and picked out a nice 8/4 (roughly 2" thick) piece of hard maple.

I still had the 2¾" drill bit from drilling a small hole in the leg for the vise hardware. This was pretty darn close to the radius of the curves called for in the plans. So, my initial idea was to use the drill bit to create those curves.

There’s a saying that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” In this case, the vibration of the big drill bit literally caused the drill press chuck to fall off the drill press. Mind you, it wasn’t a great plan to start with, as it involves drilling into only a portion of the board, since the curves are at the edge. It was clear that this plan wasn’t feasible.

So, I retreated from the drill plan, and just used a table saw to trim the boards in the lower two-thirds of the chop.

Then, a handsaw cut loose the waste.

From there, my plan was to make a template using the big drill bit, then using the template with a router.

The bit was large enough that I had to head to the tool library and check out a big ol’ saw, since nothing I had (including the two braces!) could handle the half-inch shank size. After far too much trouble, I was able to drill a single hole.

From there, I placed the template on top of each board, and used a pattern bit to route out the curves. Since my bit didn’t reach all the way down, this involved multiple passes, taking a little off each time.

This mostly worked. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough.

From there, I glued the two boards together.

Then, I spent a bunch of time cleaning up the chop with planes, the router, the sander, and even a card scraper.

I finished it off with one more trip to the tool library shop to drill a hole for the screw and use the table saw to cut the chamfer at the top.

In the end, I had a pretty decent looking chop. The hardware installation was mostly straightforward, if a bit time-consuming. There’s a lot of assembly and disassembly needed to get everything aligned just so. I needed to adjust the mortise for the crisscross mechanism a few times to get everything to line up, but, in the end, the vise moves smoothly and clamps as advertised.

The very last little task was to plane down a 2½" x 2½" block of wood to use as the planing stop. I used the Brooklyn Tool & Craft Planing Stop, which screws into the top of the wood. This ended up being both cheaper and easier to install than the Crucible Planing Stop, which happened to be out of stock when I was looking to order it.

The planing stop, as you can see below, holds a board steady while you hand plane it. It moves up and down depending on the size of the board in question.

With that, the workbench is done.

I found it to be a very achievable project, and a satisfying one, too. The materials weren’t too expensive: my materials costs were under $1,000: about $400 for wood, another $400 or so for hardware, and a bit more for glue, finish, etc. (We’re going to ignore things like holdfasts and various tools that I just had to get.)

I’m happy with how it turned out. I used it as I built the vise chop, and it handled it’s workbench duties with aplomb.