![]() Please don't take one home, it "is" worse than nothing! Disappointment is waiting around the corner. They look good from a distance but are lacking up close. I have worked on too many commercial benches to ever steer underfunded folks in that direction. OK, time to wake up, the dream is over you must go shopping for a bench. If you are lucky, you stumble across a gem of a used bench from an owner looking to find it a home. What you desperately need is a sturdy bench to start learning and improving those required skills. However, don't forget how we started this paragraph, you lack the skill to cut those massive dovetails, those through tenons and the rest of the multitude of processes that go into a dream bench. Option one, building your own custom traditional bench, is probably at the top of every woodworkers list. Now you are a new woodworker with limited skill, limited space, limited tools, limited clamps and worst of all, limited funds! You long for a good work bench and here are your options: build, buy, or make-do. This is what my MDF and plywood workbench feels like. Your mallet strike feels like you are working on actual bedrock! Everything stays put. Now contrast that to a workbench with a dead flat top and that is too heavy to budge. Try chopping with a mallet and chisel on an out-of-flat benchtop where the bounce-back equals your malt strike! I've tried to use a shooting board on a bench top so cupped the shooting board sags in the middle. Skinny wood tops sitting on what looks like the framework of a card table. ![]() The worst examples are the ones where you must chase the bench around as you plane because it has no mass no weight. What I do remember are the absolute worst and the absolute best workbenches. I have worked on more types of benches and in more locations than I can remember. I cannot overstate the value of a workbench to a hand tool woodworker, nor can I overstate the effect it has on craftsmanship. Why not forgo all that planing, make your benchtop glue-up tons easier, and build a benchtop that’s dead flat and heavy? Can you say MDF? Typically, 2 or 3 times in the first half dozen years, until it settles down. A laminated top WILL go out of flat and you must periodically re-flatten it with a larger jointer plane and winding sticks. This gives the bench the mass it needs, but guess what? Wood moves. Good hand tool workbench tops are traditionally glued up from numerous lengths of hard, dense wood. Your workbench top serves a lot of roles: it is your "flat" reference surface, it supports your work as you violently chop mortises, it acts as a big caul when gluing up case work, and it imparts most of the mass a workbench needs. Recommending that woodworkers make their workbench out of MDF and plywood reminds me of that old salsa commercial where the cowboys read the label and exclaim, “Made in New York City!” Don’t throw out the Salsa just yet, I think you will like the taste!
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