Forever Bench

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes
-Oscar Wilde

My work bench.  A beautiful crafted, 8' long, 5″ thick, pine, Roubo style french bench.  It was going to have amazing perfectly made joints, and amazing hardware for the leg vice and wagon vice.  It was going to be amazing.  Only problem.  This was my first major woodworking project and I started it nearly 8 years ago.

My overly ambitious bench stalled.  I didn’t have the right tools, I didn’t have the right experience and I had $100 of pine wood sitting around, only part of it laminated into a top.  To top it all off I was only using hand tools to make it.

My bench has since shrank to 6′ in length and maybe lost 1/4″ of thickness.  After getting serious, and acquiring some chisels and hand planes, actually made progress.

After many months I’ve managed to get all 4 legs fit the through tenons that will be drawbored.

At this point I’ve made light speed progress.  In the last few months I’ve laminated four legs, chopped four 5″ mortises,  fit four (sloppy) mortises and tenons, and cut to length 2 of the 4 rails, made a mistake and fixed it by filling the holes with 1″ oak dowels.

What changed?

Looking at a crappy laminated bench top I asked: Is this good enough?  The answer is clearly no.  I can’t seriously use a 90lb+ slab of wood on saw horses as a workbench.  So I dropped my perfectionist tendencies and just started gluing, cutting, and chopping.  Accepting that I would fall short of perfection.

I’m much happier with my janky almost finished bench to my perfect slab of junk.

Dated for March 19 2018