Making a Portable Workbench

For a long time I thought I couldn't have a workbench in my apartment. It's too small. Workbenches are big and complicated, and definitely not something you can have in a small European apartment... or are they...

The inspiration to start this project originated with a Video from Pask Makes. Then a similar one by Laura Kampf. These videos got me started thinking that maybe I could actually have a workbench in my apartment. Even if it's nothing huge. It would be enough to work on small projects, and better than the floor, or the dining table.

Laura and Pask weren't the only inspiration I leant on. They sent me down a rabbit hole of similar styles of small, portable work benches. Like This one by 731 Woodworks or Jay Bate's matchfit work horse, or his Traditional Work Horse, or Tamar of 3x3 Custom's portable workbench. These gave me 6 different takes on the same sort of problem. Slowly a design started to form in my head.

Unfortunately, the old maxim of woodworkers everywhere, that you need a workbench to make a workbench causes a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

Except it isn't a case of you need to own a workbench to make a workbench. You just need access to a workbench to make a workbench. Fortunately I am lucky that I have access to various public access workshops such as my local Neighbourhood workshop (Buurtwerkplats in Dutch), or the Openbare Werkplaats in Amsterdam. There are also makerspaces and Hackerspaces that would work for this too. For this project, I chose to use the Openbare Werkplaats in Amsterdam. I can pay for half a day of use, with access to all the tools they have available, including things like Table saws, and thickness planers, the size of which I could only ever dream of owning. Even tho it's pay to use, I worked out that I could spend 80 days in the workshop for the cost of a mid range table saw, that I don't even have the space for. It's good value.

I had the idea of a design. I had somewhere I could build the work bench. Now all I needed was something to build it from. I need wood.

Being a city apartment dweller, I don't own a car. And while I could hire a car share car like GreenWheels. It's not that much wood, and this is the Netherlands. Surely I can just use my bike...

I got the wood I needed from my local wood merchant. I opted for paying extra to get the wood planed on all four sides, I think those of a leftpondian disposition call this S4S. It drove the price up considerably. But it made life a lot easier. If you're looking at the load on that trailer and trying to work out where it all fits in the final pictures. I also got the wood for a shelf project at the same time. So there's two projects worth of wood loaded up. The trailer is a Carry Freedom Large Y, and it's been an absolute game changer for my making. I can carry upto about 45kg with it easily, and with the long towing arm, it's been fine for upto 3m long bits of wood no problem. It also packs down to about 40mm thickness to sit against the wall of my apartment. But I digress.

The material for the bench takes the form of 10 lengths of Beech (Fagus sylvatica) each is about 600mm long, 50mm thick and 100mm wide. This will be glued up to form a block with the eventual dimensions of 500mm x 400mm x 100mm. These dimensions are chosen so it will fit nicely on the 50cm deep Ikea Ivar shelves I have.

The first thing to do was glue it all up into a solid piece that would form the main body of the work bench. This I did on my living room floor, using a piece of old ikea packaging to protect the carpet. Glued using Bison D3 wood glue, and clamped together with 4 clamps, I left it overnight for the glue to set.

I had the main body of the workbench.

At this point I moved from the living room floor to the openbare werkplaats. The block for the bench was strapped to a small trolley, and taken by tram across the city to the workshop.

Despite my best efforts, the top and bottom surfaces of the block were not flat. So the first stop was a jointer to even out one side. The tools at the openbare werkplaats are big industrial scale machines, so the 500mm wide block wasn't a problem. This was my first time using a jointer. I left it set at the 0.5mm setting it was on, and took a few passes to even things up.

One flat face complete, I moved to the thickness planer. This has a capacity of 500mm wide by 250mm thick, with a nice digital thickness read out. I took a few passes here, at about 0.5mm per pass, until I had two flat and parallel faces. And because I started with planed stock, I had 2 flat sides. Tho they weren't necessarily perpendicular to the faces. Next stop, the table saw.

This is a huge beast of a saw, with a sliding table, and a very powerful three phase motor. I've used smaller table saws before, but this was my first time using something of this size and power. This was the point where I experienced table saw kickback for the first time. It was Terrifying. Having a ~18kg lump of beech thrown at you by the saw is a wake up call. Fortunately one of the nice features of the openbare werkplaats is that there's a trained technician available to help and advise with the use of the tools. Five minutes of instruction on how to better use this tool, and I was away, taking the length down to the target 500mm, and taking a strip off the edge to get the 400mm width.

The bench before the routing began:

You're probably looking at this big block of beech and wondering how does that become a work bench? The main thing that separates a work bench from a table is work holding. In particular the ability to hold your workpiece in any specific position so you can do what ever operation it is you need, whether filing, planing, sawing, chiselling etc... If you go back far enough, then the main work holding on the bench was the operator, if you look at the low roman style work benches as popularised by Rex Krueger, then you can see this sort of thing in operation. This style of bench lived on into the early medieval period in Europe, and longer in other parts of the world. It works, but to a modern western human, it's not ideal. The next development of work holding for workbenches is the hold fast, This is a hook shaped metal thingy that you put through a hole in the bench, and then thump with a mallet. It's an effective work holding technique, but it's noisy. Not ideal for an apartment. Then of course we get the option of clamps.

Clamps are a really effective way of holding your work, if you do it right. But they traditionally require an edge or large hole to get the clamp through. This is where the match fit dovetail clamps used by the likes of the 731 woodworking and Jay Bates Videos above came in. It requires a router to make the dovetail channel, but once you have the channels, then you can just slide clamps and other accessories through those channels to hold the workpiece in place. I thought on this for far too long before deciding it was the way to go. I just needed a router that could cut those channels.

I bought the router bit from MicroJig, figuring if I'm going to have to buy a router bit anyway, I may as well get the one they make and recommend. Then it's just a question of using a router to make the channels. To do this I needed some sort of guide fence to run the router along. I achieved this with a off cut of wood from the scrap bin clamped to the work bench.

At this point I got a crash course in the importance of router direction. If you look closely in the final photos you can see that the channels are not perfect, some wiggle a bit. This was me learning what happens if you run the router the wrong way. The differences between conventional milling and climb milling, for those of a metal machining background. But hey, we all gotta learn sometime.

I started by routing the two channels across the width of what would become the underside. With these in place I could use a pair of clamps to hold the workbench to the workbench I was using to build the workbench... erm. Anyway. As more channels were routed into the working faces, then it became easier to clamp guide fences in place. The work bench bootstrapping itself.

I ended up with one channel around the sides and ends of the bench horizontally 55mm from the bottom. Then a grid of 5 by 3 channels across the top, down the ends, and the front (see photos for a better idea). The length wise grooves on the top, and down the ends are on 100mm centres. The cross wise grooves on the top and down the front are on 100mm centres for the middle three, and then 90mm centres for the outer most groove on each end. This gives me a whole range of ways of work holding. Routing the channels took the bulk of the time. It would have been faster with a router table, and while the werkplaats had one, it wasn't really big enough. As well as taking the bulk of the time, it also produced by far the most mess. As I was coming to a finish, the techinician from the werkplaats came over, and handed me the end of the vacuum hose and pointed at the empty dust port on the router. Oops. Another lesson.

At this point, the workbench is done. It's really simple. Just a block of laminated beech, with dovetail grooves routed in. But that simplicity is what gives it the versatility.

To use the bench you just clamp it to some form of table. This can be any suitable table that is sturdy enough for the work being done, whether a dining table, kitchen worktop, desk, or even a picnic bench in the park. The workbench can be used where ever you can clamp it. I've primarily used it clamped to a table that lives in the basement of the apartment building I live in. This table is sturdy enough for the use I've put it through so far. It might not be up for big jobs with a scrub plane. But the bench was never designed for that.

I made a planing stop for the bench using a piece of plywood I dug out the scrap wood bin at the werkplaats. It's held in place with a pair of the micro jigs dove tail blocks and what microjig call "Wing Knobs" screws which I got as part of a starter set. I keep this planing stop fitted all the time, just so I don't lose it. To use it I just losen the bolts, slide it up, and then tighten the bolts. It works really well.

For edge jointing I can just clamp the workpiece to the front of the work bench using the vertical slots. This does mean that for something bigger than about 150mm wide it may be too big to fit in this orientation. In the event this ever happens, I can always rotate the whole work bench onto one side, clamp it down to the table, and then use what was the top, as the front to clamp the workpiece to.

When it comes to things like cutting joints, the workpiece can be easily clamped to the top of the bench this holds it in place securely for whatever sawing and/or chiselling operations are needed.

Sawing is really easy too, as I can just clamp the workpiece to which ever surface puts the saw cut in the best position. This might be the front, or the end, or the top.

Despite being a viceless bench, the front of the bench can effectively be used as a vice. I did originally cut a piece of ply to use on the front as an actual vice chop that is held in place by the clamps. But it didn't really work, and because it's not permenantly fixed like the planing stop is, it's ended up getting lost in the wood pile. But it's not needed, just clamping stuff to the front of the bench works great.

Since I built this bench, I used it to help me build another work bench. The second bench is a more traditional style of bench made from douglas fir(Pseudotsuga menziesii) with a siberian larch (Larix sibirica) top. You can see this second bench at various stages of construction in the photos about the portable bench in this post. The bench lives outside on a small balcony. While my original design for the outdoor bench was to have a vice on it. I've found that it's far simpler to just take the portable work bench outside and clamp it to the outdoor work bench. In this way it works a lot like a moxon vice, or the moxon vice hybrid thing that Jonathan Katz-Moses uses in a lot of his videos. I had some beech left over of the same size as I used to make the bench. So I laminated these into two roughly square blocks. I routed some channels into these, and they basically work as a support block when working on really long pieces. I can clamp them to what ever table is supporting the main workbench block, slightly to the side, and they work to support the extra long workpiece. I've not had much need for this yet, But it's nice knowing it's an option.

I have also found that for some tasks such as doing simple cuts or drilling, putting the bench on its end in the middle of the living room floor provides enough of a work surface to do what I need. This was an unexpected use case for the bench.

I started with four of the match fit clamps, I bought them as one pair, and the "dovetail clamp pro" set. The latter is what provided the parts needed to make the planing stop as well as the router bit for making the grooves. Since then I also got a pair of "Dovetail Track Clamp AP" clamps, which are slightly longer. I got these as I needed the extra clamping capacity to clamp the portable work bench to my outdoor workbench. In this regard, it's not a cheap bench to build. Just a pair of clamps are about €60 here in .NL. However, a woodworker can never have too many clamps, and the price isn't too bad for a reasonable quality clamp.

The design does rely on some specialist tools that a beginner may not have. Someone wanting to make this bench who doesn't have access to a community workshop, or makerspace, could plane the block on the floor, holding it in place with a non slip mat, or similar. Cutting it to size can be done with a hand saw. But the routing of the channels, that requires a powered router. It's also a messy task which is not ideal for inside a typical apartment. Routers can often be rented from tool rental companies. Or perhaps the better option is to make friends with woodworkers in your area who might be willing to let you use their router (and workspace) for a couple of hours in exchange for some beer, or a maybe some help with their larger projects. Community is a really useful part of making.

I'm really glad I made this workbench. It's been really useful in ways I never expected. I learnt a lot in making it, and it's provided me with a work surface that I can build upon to make future projects.