I’ve built a number of practical work surfaces over the years. One of the first was three-foot bench made from 2×10 that I used for everything from cutting wood to bending metal to sitting on to eat lunch. It was a very solid and strenuously portable (heavy) all-purpose tool.
That one, I made at a jobsite and left there when I was finished. I imagine it is still there, actually, sitting in the boiler room of that building. No one would think to get rid of it, although I’m sure no one would see its true value.

A workshop workbench is no less a solid and steady companion in your endeavours than my cobbled workhorse was. You can sketch your plans on it, you can layout your cuts on it, you can assemble your smaller projects on it, you can set your coffee on it. Everything ends up on it after a while and, in my case, it’s normally hard to see the top of the bench through all the stuff piled on it.
So you can think of your workbench as a good dependable helper in your workshop. Mine is more like a slave or pack-mule that has become overburdened and abused.

What I look for in a workbench is a good, solid, strong top. I think that might be from the years I spent using a piece of half-inch plywood on two sawhorses as a workbench. Nothing in the world could make that arrangement appealing, but I still resort to it whenever I am away from the shop. When working on site, you use whatever’s handy and make something temporary.
My bench is made from glued-up 2x10s. They were old and cracked and cupped when I got them (but completely dry), so I ripped them into pieces three inches wide, jointed one side flat, then recut the sides of each piece, and glued them all together. I made a big open cabinet as the base, with plans to add doors and drawers for various tool and accessories.

That was several years ago. Time passes pretty quickly when you’re not doing what you planned to do. So, the workbench is exactly as it was. Other than the top being very solid, it’s not much different from plywood on sawhorses.
Maybe my new year’s resolution should be to finish my workbench and then to treat it properly. It would be part of a good change in attitude about organization. Instead of the drop-where-last-used system of organizing, maybe I should resolve to have an actual place for things. And then resolve to actually putting those things away. The workbench can be central to such a system. The first step would be keeping the top clean.

I know a guy who knew himself so well, he made one of his benches have a top that was actually an open grid, so it was impossible to keep anything smaller than a corded tool on it. I’m not sure that the glue was even dry before he had a piece of plywood on top to hold all the drill bits, chisels, small parts, pencils, knives, and so on.
But if I take a unified approach and team up with my workbench, if I make a really good friend of it, we can order the workshop. Every driver bit will have a home, every useful piece of material will be neatly stowed, and pencils will always be easy to find.

I’m sure everyone has had all of the various pencil problems. The main one is (a) I can’t find a pencil. But there are several different and equally annoying ones. There is (b) I have a pencil, but it needs to be sharpened and I can only find my block plane. There is (c) just when I go to use my pencil, the lead falls out. That is a special one, because what happens then is when you try to sharpen the pencil, the lead continually falls out until you have nothing at all left. Then there is the worst one of all, and it happens most often when you need to mark something very precisely: (d) when I mark with my pencil, it actually makes two parallel lines 1/32 of an inch apart, because it previously fell on the floor and didn’t actually break the point but just ruined it, and neither of the marks it just made are correct.

Benches do that when you don’t treat them properly. They hide, abuse, maim, and kill your pencils. They are equally hard on chisels. Chisels always end up on the floor under the bench if you don’t control your junk. And everyone knows chisels only ever land sharp-side down.

I know this is a resolution that will not last. I’ve made it before. I think it’s actually on the bench somewhere, written in smudged pencil.

Original publish date December 29, 2013