Split Top Roubo Workbench: The Woodworker’s ULTIMATE Project (1/2)

– Today I'm taking on my
most ambitious build to date, the split top roubo. In this video we're gonna
be focusing on the top. So let's get started, on Timber Biscuit. So if you're not aware of
what a split top roubo is, it's basically a really large workbench, and this workbench is comprised of about 180 board foot of lumber. So it's pretty massive. Now, throughout the video,
I'll cover more about what the workbench does and how it works, but for now let's get to
breaking down the lumber. So the first thing I needed to do was to cut down my nine and 10 foot boards into eight foot sections.

This makes the boards a
little bit easier to manage, even though at this point
they're still pretty large, but with the boards in
eight foot sections, it gives me about five
extra inches on either side so I can trim them back and
eliminate some of that snipe we're gonna get during
the milling process. So once I have the boards milled down, I brought them over to the jointer to put one clean edge on all of 'em. This will give you a nice
flat reference surface to rip these boards down over at the bandsaw here in a second. Now this bench design is heavily inspired by Bench Crafted and Mr.
Spagnuolo, as far as the plans go. But Chris Schwarz was also
a huge influence on me for this one, so you're gonna
see that throughout the build.

So while I'm not gonna go into detail about every dimension
that I'm cutting here, I am gonna go into detail
about my experience with it and what I think would help you guys if you're building split top roubo. Not to mention that this build in general has a ton of advanced
woodworking techniques, so I hope you find it helpful. All right, so with that out of the way, what I'm doing here is
dripping my boards down to some pretty thick sections. I'm trying to keep my boards
to around four and a half to five inches since the final top will be thickness down
to about four inches. So anywhere we can get some
breathing room in here is ideal. So once all that's done,
I'm left with 14 boards that range between four
and a half to five inches. And from there I can bring
them over to the planer to thickness them down
to their rough dimension. Here I'm aiming for the
thickest flattest boards I can possibly get.

Now since these boards
are already pretty flat, I'm just gonna skip plane
them over at the planer. But if there were some big
curves or any big deviations, I'd have to joint one face first, and that would cause me
to use a lot more material than I really want to. So skip planing the boards
lets me conserve material. But can leave a little bow on the boards that we'll have to deal with
at the glue up later on. So once I have two coplanar faces, I can bring the boards
back over to the jointer to put in clean edge on one side. Now, throughout all these processes, I highly recommend using roller stands. They allow for the boards to
have a little bit of leeway when coming on and off the machines and if there's an emergency,
I can let go of the boards and they're not gonna come
crashing to the ground.

So with one edge jointed, my next step was to thickness all the boards down so they're all the same width. And here we're shooting for
about four and a quarter inches. Oh, and I should mention too that by this point all of my boards are the same consistent thickness, which at the end of all these processes, will leave me with two slabs
that are seven boards thick and the same width. But for now, we're gonna
keep our front slab at five boards in thickness
and our rear slab at seven, and that's to leave room
for our dog hole strip and our front laminate. But don't worry, we'll cover
that when we get there. For now, just like I
tell my son all the time, you gotta trust me. Well that and pick up your clothes.

So now what I'm doing is
laying out some dominoes. Given that these boards
are eight feet long, I wanna make sure that I give it the best opportunity possible to keep my top and bottom flat. So what I've done here is I've
flipped my boards upside down and I'm placing in some
dominoes as deep as I can. What this will do is keep those dominoes away from the top of of my slab, as well as give me a reference for the bottoms of all my boards. Now even with these dominoes
in here, during the glue up, the boards are gonna
wanna shift a little bit, so we're gonna have to address
that with a hand plane. But something like dominoes,
biscuits, or dowels, will dramatically cut down on
the stress during the glue up. And as I've covered countless
times on the channel, if there's anything I can do to avoid stress during that time, I do it. All right, so with offsetting
dominoes cut on all my boards, I could go ahead and start the glue up.

Now since I have a stack of cherry boards, I'm gonna go ahead and use
a roller to apply my glue. This will give me a nice even coat, as well as make applying the
glue a heck of a lot faster. And while applying that glue
mayo to my wood sandwiches, let's talk a little bit
about the lumber choice. For my bench, I decided
to go with a combination of eight quarter cherry
and eight quarter walnut, and that's partly because I
really love working with cherry, but it's also not an overly dense species. So it's not gonna ding up projects that I work on on the bench. And the combination of walnut will give it some nice contrast and pop on those accents
that I really want it to. Plus cherry is right there at 950 in the Janka hardness scale, which is equivalent of
something like a maple that you traditionally see
these benches made from. So once I have my slab
completely assembled, I could throw on a ton of clamps and squeeze the crap out of 'em. And then I'll follow the same process for the seven board slab, but we don't need to go over
that since we just watched it.

All right, so with the glue
dry and the clamps removed, I just use the glue and paint scraper to scrape away any of
that excess squeeze out. And it's worth noting that I also use this while the slab was still in clamps, but I forgot to film that part. Sorry. From there I could start
flattening the bottom of my slabs. And to do that I'll just
use a number four smoother. Once I got the front edge flat, I could use a set of winding
sticks to sight down the slab and remove any of the
imperfections that I could see. Now every slab is gonna have slightly different variances in it, so I caution you from just going to town using the smoother. But for the most part, you
just wanna work in sections moving your way down the slab and removing any of those imperfections. You're trying to make
this as flat as possible so that when you put
it through the planer, it has a nice reference face for the bed and it gives you a nice
coplanar top to your bench.

I would venture to say that more important than a perfectly flat bottom is a 90 degree face to your bench. So if it's not perfectly flat, you can bring the smaller
slab over to your jointer and give it a nice square face, which is actually what I ended up doing with my smaller slab. But for the larger slab that
won't fit across a jointer, that one just takes a little bit of time. So my recommendation is to get yourself a set of winding sticks, in my case, I use some aluminum
T-Track and get to work. So once I have the bench mostly flat, I just wanna cross it one
time with my number four, then back across on the other direction, and we're good to go. From there, I just took the
smaller slab over to the jointer and took one light pass.

Now by this point, these
things are super heavy, so if you have anybody that can help you move these in the shop, I
highly recommend you do so. Thankfully my wife was
around for this process, so she helped me put them in position so I don't have to worry
about dropping them. Then with my flattened side down, I could run both slabs through the planer. And hey, if you're
enjoying this build so far, be sure to give it a like, it helps the video spread to more people and I really appreciate the support. Thank you. So with the smaller slab
thickness down to four inches, I could repeat the process
with the larger slab, only this time using a
little bit of assistance.

Shout out to the supportive spouses. All right, so with the
two slab thickness down, I can start trimming them
down to their final length. But for now, I'll leave
the front slab long on the leg vise end, and then we'll trim that to length after we get the front laminate on. So to trim these down,
I'm gonna lay out a line that wraps around my entire end, and I'm doing this on the end
where the tail vise will go because installing it
will be the next step.

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So I'll use an x-acto
knife to scribe in a line and then reinforce it with a pencil. This just makes the line
a lot easier to see. So I start this process off
the front face and the top, and when I'm done, if
everything is square, my two ends on my line
should meet up perfectly. And thankfully here they
did, but if they didn't, I would need to go back to my jointer and square up the front. But since we're good, we can
go ahead and trim this off. And to do that, I'm
gonna use my track saw. Now my track saw obviously
doesn't plunge deep enough to cut all the way through the slab, so I'm gonna have to
do this in two passes. And what it's gonna do is leave me with a small bit in the center that I'll have to cut off by
hand, but that's no matter, that's what a flush trim saw is for. So I will say that nailing this cut is one of the trickier
parts of this build so far.

If for whatever reason your two cuts aren't lined up perfectly, you can always go back and flush
them up using a hand plane. So don't worry. Now here what I'm doing
is using my block plane to remove that center ridge and I'll sand this back
later on when the time comes. For this particular end, it's
not super important anyway, since we're gonna be cutting the tenon for our end cap end to it. So at the right end of my
front slab trimmed down, I could repeat that same process for the rear slab on both ends. And since we just had practice
on that right front end, I think that it makes nailing these two just a little bit easier. Now what I'm going for here is
my end dimension of 87 inches which again is gonna be
the overall dimension for the final bench.

And as I've just realized,
I haven't mentioned the overall dimensions for this bench yet, I'll go over 'em now. So the bench is gonna be 24 inches wide, 87 inches long, and 35 inches tall, which is perfect for my size and the type of woodworking I do. If you're a lot taller or a lot smaller, then you may need to adjust the height, or if a bench that size
wouldn't fit in your shop, you obviously can adjust the length. So what I'm doing here is laying out that pretty massive tenon we
were talking about earlier. And this is gonna fit
right into our end cap, so we wanna get this
as accurately as we can to the center of our slab. So once I have it all laid
out, I'll just use my track saw to remove the material that I need to start the tenon shoulder. Then I'll use my track saw
to remove more material so that I can establish the tenon face. And I just did this by
taking multiple passes, removing as much material as I could.

And again, I'm being careful
to stay on my line here so that I don't overcut my shoulder. To cut the edge of the tenon, I'll just flip my work piece
up and cut the shoulder there. For this cut, I'm undercutting to make sure that I don't
go anywhere near my line and I'll sneak up to that
with some chisels in a second. From there, I could
release a little tension, both figuratively and physically, and remove some of that extra material. With the excess out of the way, I can start working on the tenon edge. Here, I just stayed a hair
away from my line again so that I can sneak up to
the cut with my chisels. And while I sneak up to that cut, let me sneak in a segue to say, if you're enjoying this video, subscribe, I put on new videos all the time about woodworking tips,
tricks, and furniture builds.

So if you're enjoying this one, you'll probably enjoy the others. And since this is a two-parter, you're definitely gonna wanna subscribe so you don't miss the next one. Thanks. So now that I have the edge exposed, I can start cleaning up the face, which again sounds like a
conversation I'd have with my son. Anyway, I'm gonna use
my chisel to knock down some of those larger pieces and then I'll come back
with my shoulder plane to knock down the high spots. Here I'm just going for two
flat faces all the way across, again, trying my best to
keep them in the center. Now if you don't have a large
shoulder plane like this one or a rabbet plane, you could just plane these
down using a block plane and then come back and flush
that up using a chisel. Really what we're trying to do is knock down those high spots so that we have a nice flat face. For the area where I undercut the tenon, I'm just gonna use my chisels
to flatten out that top edge and then use that to
reference against my plane and come back and flatten
out any of those high spots.

And it's also important to make
sure that top edge is flush so that when the end cap goes on, you don't see a gap when
viewing the top of the bench. And as you can see here,
we did a pretty good job. If anything, we're a
little under in the center, which is fine. All right, so the next step
is to lay out the mortis for the screw on the
bench crafted tail vise.

Now this thing's pretty big, so we're gonna use a
router with an edge guide to carve it out. So to stabilize a router
base, I just jointed a board and then clamped it on
using some parallel clamps. Now the parallel clamps
are doing two things here. They're both holding on
my sacrificial piece, as well as acting as a
stop for my edge guide. So, good job parallel clamps. So the bit I'm using here is
a half inch spiral upcut bit and the reason I'm using an upcut bit is to help pull the chips up and away from the bottom of the mortise.

Since it's a ton of material to remove, I much prefer this to a straight
bit for this type of cut. But if you have a favorite
bit for cutting mortises, let me know what it is
down on the comments. So this process does
take a little bit of time 'cause I only remove about
a half inch with each pass. With a final full depth pass, removing about a 16th of
an inch off the back wall to make sure everything's nice and flush. And then from there I
can grab some chisels and clean up the right
side of the mortise.

Now while this isn't super important, since no one will ever see it, I know it's there and you know it's there, so let's clean it up. I'll also say there's
a fair amount of mortis and tenon joinery ahead of us, so any practice that we
can get, let's take it. So once I have the bulk
of the material removed, I just shave down the edges to make sure that I
have a nice clean face, though I honestly wouldn't know
much about that these days. All right, so the next step is to mark out the tenon on our end cap.

And for the end cap I'm gonna be using the one piece of scrap that
I have that's 12 quarter. Luckily, it fit perfectly
for this project, so I'm thankful for that. This is one of those rare times where I feel vindicated
that I saved things. So the mortise all marked out, I could use my router on edge guide again along with my spiral bit
to remove the material. Here I just took it slow and plunged down until I reached the final mortise depth, which for this one is pretty deep. This is definitely one of those projects that forced me to trust
my tools and my settings. In the past I've had plunge routers that have slipped off the setting or plunged past what I had set, but thankfully that never
happened on this project, so that was a huge confidence boost.

And after a few passes, it
was ready for a test fit, and thankfully it fit pretty snug. I did have to go back and use
a shoulder plane on a tenon for a couple passes, but nothing major. All it needed was a little tappy tappy. Next I could use the template to lay out the drill
holes for the end cap. Now there's a ton of different holes that go into the end cap and all of those are laid
out based on the template from Bench Crafted. So I'm not gonna cover what each one is, but just know that this
thing's pretty accurate and as long as you line it
up perfectly, it works great. So once I had all the holes laid out, I could bring the piece
over to my drill press and start drilling some holes. Now this first one's
gonna be a counter bore, so let's start with
the larger Forstner bit and then work my way
down to the smaller one and a quarter inch Forstner bit.

And this one is gonna be a through hole, but since my drill press
only plunges to two inches, I had to take this in
two different passes. So what I did was just raise the bed of the drill press up slightly so that the drill bit
started inside the hole. This gave me enough clearance to be able to plunge those
deeper holes for this project and I had to do that quite a few times throughout this build, but sometimes you just gotta
work with the tools you got. Another option would be just
to use these as a starter hole and then use a hand drill to finish the holes off at the bench.

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And I do that later on in the project for some of the dog holes. But again, we'll get into
that when we get there. For now, I found this
to be the easiest way to keep things at 90 degrees
and I think it worked out well. So once I did two through
bolts counter bored for the end cap, I could start cutting the
slotted holes for those bolts. And what that means is
I'll plunge in three holes at the drill press for each hole. This way if there's any seasonal movement, there's plenty of room for the
bolts to move in the end cap and they won't split it. So once I have my first hole plunged, I just moved the end cap over slightly so I can plunge the
second and third holes. This is by far the easiest way that I've found a cut
slotted holes like this. All right, so with the work wrapped up over at the drill press, I can take the end cap and
place it back over the tenon and drill those starter holes into the end of my tenon for those bolts.

Again here, I'm just trying to line it up with the center of my slotted hole so that things stay centered. This part's especially important because in order for our barrel nuts to line up with our bolts, we want to keep things
as straight as possible. Now I was off slightly with mine and all I did was sight down the bolts to be able to line up
those barrel nuts again, but you really wanna try to keep these as straight as you can. So once I had my initial holes drilled, I could just remove the end
cap and use those as a guide to finish drilling the holes. And it's also important to
note that I want to go past where I wanna put the barrel nuts here so the threads and the bolts have room to go past the barrel nuts.

So once I knew where my
barrel nuts needed to live, I could go ahead and drill those in. And for that I'm just
gonna use a Forstner bit. Now this did take a little while because I didn't have a better bit than a Forstner bit to do these, but I did eventually get there, even if it killed a couple
batteries along the way. I'll also say that putting
a square next to the drill really helped me keep things
aligned for the plunge. So, pro tip. So after about 10 minutes of
drilling and two batteries, I could finally attach the
bolts to the barrel nuts. And here we're not trying to
tighten these down all the way, we just wanna snug 'em up so that we can work with
the rest of the end cap. If you're finding this
part tricky as I did, you may wanna use a sharpie to mark where the hole
location is on the barrel nut.

I found it a lot easier
to line it up that way. From there we can flip it over and see how the top of
the bench turned out. Nice. All right, so next it's
time to to lay out the holes for our dog hole strip. And to do that I'm gonna mark
about 1 5/8 inch from the end and then mark out a dog
hole every four inches. I will leave about an eight
inch gap where our leg vise goes so that we don't drop a dog
hole into our clamping area. Now there's a ton of debate
on whether you should use square dog holes or round dog holes. I ultimately went with round dog holes because of the versatility.

A lot of tools out there
use round dog holes and I'd like to use those tools, so I went with the round dog hole. And the size of the dog holes I'm using are three quarters of an inch. There are options to do one
inch dog holes out there, but again, I think that the
three quarter inch dog hole is much more versatile. But again, that's personal preference, so if you prefer the square
dog hole or the round dog hole, let me know down in the comments. So for this process, I got a brand new three quarter inch bit and this thing works fantastically. And I used it first
over at the drill press to start all of my dog holes and then I finished them off with my hand drill on the bench. Since there's 17 holes total,
including the dog block, I found this to be the
fastest and easiest way to do all these dog holes.

My only real tip here would be to charge up all your batteries
before you start this process because it definitely
does a number on 'em. Once I had things recharged
though, it went pretty quickly. And from there I could start
plunging in the dominoes so we could attach the dog hole strip. The dog strip aligns to right
where the tail vise mortis is. So that makes lining it
up pretty straightforward.

So from there I could repeat the process of applying a bunch of glue
and a crap ton of clamps. And that's probably something I should mention for this project. This project uses more clamps than I have for any other project that
I've actually ever made. So if you find yourself in a situation where you're able to get a
bunch of clamps for this project from a neighbor or a friend,
or if you see a sale on clamps before you start this project, I would definitely recommend you do so because you're gonna use 'em. I'll say in toll you could
get by with about 12 clamps, but you're gonna have to
space out your glue ups if you do it that way, so
just keep that in mind. And when we're talking about glue ups, we're obviously talking
about time for this project.

And in total this project
took me 12 full days. But since you likely won't
be filming your progress, you could probably do it a little quicker, or if you wanna take your time with it, I think this is a fun
project to hop in and out of. All right, so at the top of
our do hole strip planed down, we could start focusing
on that front laminate. And the first thing we need to do is lay out our massive condor tails. Now I always start by making sure that the end of my board is square before laying out any of my dovetails. And once I'm confident that they are, I go ahead and start
laying out the spacing for the ends of my tails. Next I set my bevel
square to seven degrees and lay out the ends for my tails. And I do this process on
both sides of the board. Now with these dovetails, you can get as creative as you want with some hounds tooth or
whatever you want to do. As most of you know, I love simplicity, so I just went with two
large tails for my bench.

From there I can bring the work piece over to my bandsaw to cut them out. And to cut 'em out, I'm just gonna use this jig
that I made with a screw and a seven degree angle cut. This allows me to slide the
whole jig along the fence and cut the tails out evenly on each side. And because I'm using
a nice big resaw blade, it leaves me with pretty smooth surfaces. So I won't really have to do
any cleanup with my chisels, which for this process is nice. So once I have the first set of tails cut, all I have to do is flip the board over and cut the second set in. That's the beauty of
using a jig like this, it automatically centers
the tails on the board and I don't really have to think about it, I just have to set up the
initial cut on my line and I'll know that both lines will ultimately line up in the end. And you can use the same
setup for any size dovetail. They don't have to be
monsters like this guy.

And then to remove the waist at the pins, I just take a few more passes. From there, I take the
piece back over to the bench and cut the shoulder using a pull saw. And here I'm careful to stay about a 16th of an inch away from the line so I can establish a nice
shoulder with my chisels. At this point, we really don't
want to cut into our shoulder or our tails, so definitely
take your time with this one. Since I use a marking gauge, dropping my chisels on
that line is super easy. All I have to do is give
my chisel a couple taps with the mallet and it
really reinforces that line. From there, I can break
off a few small pieces and really establish that shoulder and do the same process
around the entire shoulder. This way I have a nice square edge for my chisels to reference. Though for clearing out
the remaining material, I do try to stay away from
this line as much as I can.

This way I don't risk overcutting it. If anything, what we
wanna do is undercut these so that we leave that edge alone. And what I mean by that is scooping out the remaining material
that's inside the shoulder. Here, we want a really square
perimeter to our shoulder, but the inside of it doesn't
really matter as much since no one's ever gonna really see it. And if it is undercut or scooped out, that gives us plenty of room for glue or any little scrap bits that could be remaining in the joint. We don't want the joint to be overly tight and if we scoop out a
little bit more material than we need to there, it's gonna make the outside of
the joint look a lot cleaner.

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Now that's not to say
you should go crazy here. Just about a 32nd of an
inch undercut, is plenty. Or if you feel super confident and you think everything's
perfectly squared, you don't have to undercut it at all. With tails this large, I just chose to air on
the side of caution. So once I have the outside material of my shoulders cleared out, I could go ahead and start
working on that center pin. And to remove the bulk of the material, I'll just use my mortising chisel and then work my way through
the wider blade bench chisels, to some thinner ones to get out
the material in the corners.

The inside of the corners of the tails can be kind of tricky, so I was just careful and
use some smaller chisels to really work my way in there, making sure not to cut any
material away from the tails. Once I had all the material removed, I again checked everything for square, making sure that the
outside of my shoulders lined up perfectly. And since everything looked good, we could go ahead and lay
out the ends of our tails onto the end of our end cap. Once I had those marked out, I brought the whole end
cap over to my table saw and trimmed it down to its final length. Now for this cut, I'm just
gonna use my miter gauge, but do be aware that there's
a lot of blade exposed for a cut like this, so here I'm just taking my time, making sure to make a nice smooth cut.

With my end cap cut to length, I removed about a quarter inch of material from the backside of my tails. This will establish a rabbet on the backside shoulder of the tails, making laying out the pins
for these massive tails a heck of a lot easier. Now this doesn't have to be perfect, as you can see, mine aren't. We're just looking to remove about a quarter inch of material and then really clean up that shoulder like we did the rest of the tails.

Again, just be careful
when you're doing this, 'cause it's not like you
can go to a retail store to get another set. Whew, that was pushing it even for me. All right, so now it's time
to lay out our sockets. And first what I'm gonna do,
is mark a line around my tails and from there I'll tap
the board over slightly to where I can scribe a marking line about halfway through the
center of my pencil marks. From there, I'll tap the tails
back over to the other side and repeat that process. This should allow for the tails to drop right into the sockets without
overcutting the sockets or undercutting the sockets. From there, I clamped on a support board and started to remove the
material using a templating bit. Here I'm just taking light passes until I'm about a half
an inch into my socket, which in this case
would've been two passes. Then from there I can just take my chisels and square off that
outside edge of the socket.

This way I don't have to focus on getting a perfectly chiseled socket all the way through this end grain and I can use my templating bits. Now it did take about four passes using my quarter inch templating bit until I had enough space to
use my one inch templating bit, in which case I could take
out the remaining material. This was a pretty high anxiety moment, so I just took my time
and trusted my tools. From there, it was just
a little bit more cleanup to try to get the tails to fit in snugly, which is not the same as snuggly, though I suppose that could work too. Here I didn't fully seat the tails just cause I didn't
wanna risk breaking them getting 'em back out. So here I just had to trust that they were gonna fit in the end. And what I did do was add a small chamfer onto the bottom side of the tails to make sure that they would
fit into the sockets easily.

And then from there gluing
on the front lamination was the same as gluing
in the dog hole strip. So while we tidy that up, I'd
like to take a moment and say that if you're enjoying these videos and you find them helpful or useful and you wanna support the channel, I'd like to invite you to join my Patreon, where you'll get discount
codes on plans and merch an invite to the Discord server
and some other free stuff. So if that sounds like something
you'd be interested in, be sure to check out the
link in the description. And for those of you
who've already joined, thank you guys so much for
your continued support. It's your donations that
allow me to do this. So, thank you. Alright, so with the glue dry, I could cut my front slab
to the 87 inch final length. And to do that, I'm just
gonna follow the same process that we did earlier in the video. From there, it was time
to install the rails for our tail vise hardware. So the first thing I needed to do was test out the width of
the mortise with the rails.

And for me it fit perfectly. If it was a little too
wide or a little too tight, I would need to adjust the gap here. But since everything
seems to be aligned well, I didn't have to do much. From there, I could just mark
out the spacing for the rails and the depth to cut for the mortise. Here I just made sure to measure from the top of the bench
rather than the bottom to make sure that the mortise
was the correct depth. Next, I just use a three
quarter inch straight bit in the router, plus my edge
guide to, cut the mortises in. One thing I didn't mention
earlier that I should have is when I'm cutting mortises, I always work from left to right, and I try to keep the
material that I'm cutting into on the far side away from the guide, this way I have the best
control over the router.

All right, now that we've
made a mess in the shop, we can go ahead and clean
up those rounded edges that were left by the bit. From there, we could drill
in a couple pilot holes using our rails as guides and then remove the rails and
finish drilling in the holes. Now while installing this tail vise, it's important to check the
vise operation multiple times during the installation. At any time, things could shift and cause binding in the vise, and we definitely don't want that as this thing should be buttery smooth. So once I tested the operation
and was happy with the fit, I could go ahead and loosely
drive in the outer four screws. Since these screws are super long, I did add a little bit of
wax at the end of the tips to ensure they drove into the
wood a little bit more easily. And the reason we started
with the outer four screws is because if there's any issues, it makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot than if all the screws
were installed at one time. So once each screw is driven in, I did go back and test
the function of the vise just to make sure that
everything was working well.

Once I had all the screws installed, I could go ahead and
install the mounting bolts for the flange, and then once
again, test the functionality. From there, I could get to work on trimming down the dog block. And to do that I'm just
gonna mark things out and then use my crosscut
sled to cut it down. There's a small notch that needs to be cut into the dog block, so
once I marked that out, I took the piece over to my
bandsaw and notched it out. Here I just made sure to
make the nicer drill hole face towards the top of the bench. Now we're gonna have to
flatten this whole bench top at the end of the project anyway, so if there is a little tear out, it's not gonna be the end of the world, but we'll save that for the next part. And then from there I tested the fit and mine was a little snug, so I just used my number
four to finesse it.

And once I felt like the dog
block slid pretty effortlessly, I could go ahead and secure it down. Once I pre-drilled the holes, I got under the bench and
drove in those two screws. I did use a little bit of
wax on these threads again because the screws are pretty monstrous. And even then it was
still pretty difficult, so I flipped the bench over and finished 'em off from the top. And that's gonna wrap up the
first part of this build. So next time we'll focus on the mortise and tenon base joinery, the massive leg vise chop, and all the small details to
getting this bench finished. But believe me when I
say, the end is worth it. So we're about halfway through with a ton of work left to do. So make sure you subscribe so
you don't miss the next one. And if you're looking
for more sawdust glory, check out this video over here next, and I'll see you next time. (upbeat music).

As found on YouTube