Workbench: Unleash the Yaks of War

In my first post I explained, poorly and at length, how I ended up with an insatiable desire to build a wood gear clock, and that I wanted to use a CNC Router to do so. But first, I needed a workbench on which to place the CNC router. And to build the workbench, I needed tools. Thus began the last six months of yak shaving, which began with building a workbench.

I watched a bunch of youtube videos on how to make a workbench, bought a boatload of 2x4s, some ply wood, a circular saw, a drill, a cool saw horse thingy, a matching set of Carhartt pants and hat, and got to it. Oh, and a dust mask, goggles, and ear plugs.

I saw this vice style sawhorse on youtube and decided to get one, and it’s really great. It holds both lumber and surprisingly large plywood sheets and is super easy and quick to setup.

Here’s the basic frame, the legs are the way they are so that on one side you can screw one leg into two of the frame boards. After this, I added a lower frame near the bottom, and a bunch of cross bars for the plywood to sit on top of. Then cut the plywood to the right size, and placed it on the frame.

Once the plywood was in place, I screwed it down onto the frame and the many many cross bars. The dogs helped out where they could.

And that’s it! It’s super heavy, very sturdy, and worked out way better than I was expecting. Don’t worry though, there will be plenty of mistakes in all the projects that come next! After using it for a while, the only thing that I wish was different is the top of the workbench. Even with lots of crossbars, the plywood top is a bit springy and when hammering things there’s some bounce that gets transferred into whatever I’m hitting. If I had a planer, I think a better choice would be to make the top entirely out of 2x4s that have been glued together and planed flat. That would also take this workbench from very heavy to incredibly heavy, but I think it’d make it a bit less bouncy.