History's Forgotten Workbench

Let me confess: I do not love my low Roman bench.

It is a cheap and effective way to get going in woodwork, but it also makes my back hurt a bit and I find tool storage a little clumsy. A few hundred years ago, woodworkers in the West decided to stand up.

It was a good move.

And we might be living in the Golden Age of Benches. Woodworker/scholars like Chris Schwarz have resurrected traditional European designs. The Roubo and the Nicholson are vast improvements over the flimsy, plywood tables that many of us used to call “benches.” But neither of these designs is easy to build. I’m decent woodworker and I don’t know if I could build one of Chris' slab-topped French monsters even if I could source the wood.

And yes, there are construction-wood versions of all the famous benches. There are knock-down designs littering the Internet. But most are too hard for the beginner. They're not designed for the hand-tool woodworker with limited space and no power-tools.

The truth is, woodworking teachers have not done enough to make good benches available to the beginner. I have not done enough. I can do better. So I'm going to start from scratch and invent some magical new beginners’ bench and get it perfect on the first try, right? Hell no. 

This is a process and it starts with research.

Most woodworking problems were solved a long time ago. But the solutions were lost in our post-war rush to modernize every aspect of our lives. We knew what to do, but we forgot. So when I want to innovate, I look at the history. 

We all know where to start: Roubo, Nicholson, Moxon, Diderot, and Holtzapffel all write about lovely benches. They’ve all been built and they all work. But there, the trail grows cold. 200 years ago, there was no such thing as woodworking for fun. There were no beginners; there were only apprentices who learned at their masters’ benches and only built their own after years of training. So maybe history doesn’t offer a bench for the beginner.

I wasn’t even looking for a bench when I came across this:

It’s not much to look at, but it is…big. And it looks quite sturdy. Look at the materials. The timbers are stout but they’re just softwoods; construction lumber throughout.

I can hear the objections already. “Rex, you bald idiot, that’s just a Nicholson! It’s everywhere. We’ve seen it.” And that’s what I thought, but look closer. There’s no joinery. The whole thing is fastened together with fasteners. Instead of the mortise and tenon construction we expect, the bench has been screwed and nailed together. And sure, there’s that familiar wide front apron but look at the top. See that thin, shoddy planking in the middle? It’s too shallow for a tool well and it breaks up the enormous, perfectly flat top we’ve all been taught to expect. The focus is on a narrow work surface just in front of the craftsperson; the rest of the benchtop is mere storage.

Look at this one:

There isn’t even a rear timber. The worker gets a scant 12 inches in front of him and the rest of the bench dissolves into almost nothing.

More details: many of these benches lack the characteristic 45° cuts at the corners of the aprons. Many of them have no holes for dogs or holdfasts. They mostly sport a single vice, which is odd since these benches are bigger than my car.

And things get weirder. As we move forward in history, the benches shrink. The aprons get shorter and we see fewer nails. More screws. The occasional  bolt. Sure, this thing is a cousin of Nicholson, but it’s way down the family tree. This is your mom’s second-cousin’s stepson who got arrested that time. We don’t talk about him.

And these benches aren't rare oddballs, knocked together by broke carpenters 100 years ago. Search the Internet and you’ll find another,

and another,

and another. (Perhaps even decked-out in a dashing red-and-black paint job.)

There are so many of these benches that even the cynics among us must eventually give over and ask: what the hell are these things?

They are joiner’s benches. 

Okay, great. What the hell is a joiner? 

Good question. 

Before the industrial revolution, no one in England called themselves a woodworker.  As far back as the 1600s, woodwork was divided into a dozen or more specialties. Look at a census from the time and you’ll find everything from carpenters to carvers to coffin makers. And in among this lot was the joiner, a man much in demand but hard to define.

A joiner could do carpentry, possibly framing, but more likely fine interior work involving doors, windows, frames, and trim. Many of them also made furniture, especially in the joined style (see Peter Follansbee’s blog for some examples.) These fellows were as versatile as you could get in a hyper-specialized field like construction and furniture. They could do a bit of everything. And other craftsmen noticed and resented it. (If you’d like to know more about the surprisingly vicious fights between joiner’s and carpenters, I can suggest some very dry academic articles.)

The joiner’s trade changed over the centuries, but it never really disappeared and the English tradition retains a blurry line between carpenter, joiner, and furniture maker. Paul Sellers, who was born in 1950, began by building houses, then moved on to outfitting them with doors and trim, and finally settled into fine furniture. It’s a weird, gray area, but if a joiner can do all of these things, then they need a little more attention. Maybe some of us who call ourselves “woodworkers” should pick a different name.

But wait: benches. We’re talking about benches.

Fast forward to the early 20th century. The industrial revolution is ripping along. Standards of living are rising. The big and swelling middle class wanted nice houses and they wanted them nicely appointed. There was plenty of work for the joiner and he needed a bench.

By 1900, technology had given the joiner the cast-iron face vice and factory-made screws. When a workman needed a solid surface, he might have just built it on site using whatever lumber was handy. Look at this one:

See that zigzag routed into the inside of the rear apron? Those slots are probably for stair treads and risers. Wood intended for a staircase stringer got made into a bench instead. The joiner did his work and maybe the bench was left or dismantled. Maybe it was simply moved to the next site, or it found its way indoors where it slowly started turning out furniture instead of window frames.

This bench became the bench. Forget all the pictures I’ve shown you. Look at this:

When I found this picture, my eyes damn-near popped out of my skull. Here was the bench I had been chasing and the author even tells me what to call it: the joiner’s bench. The illustration comes from Archibald Williams’ 1900 book, Things to Make, and while the title sounds like a bad Youtube channel, the book itself is a delightful little DIY manual that takes the reader from building a sawhorse all the way up to a model steam engine. (The book is free online and worth flipping through.)

Williams includes measured drawings of the bench from several angles and he spends a whole chapter detailing how to make it: the secret is the fastened diagonal brace. Instead of using the traditional but time-consuming mortise and tenon to absorb the bench’s twist and wrack, the author explains how we can steady the top by screwing or nailing on extra bits at 45° angles. The result is not pretty, but it must have worked, because real-life craftsmen used it over and over again.

Most of these braced benches concentrate the extra supports at the left-front corner of the bench; exactly the place where the joiner’s planing strokes and mallet blows would have stressed the bench the most. This was a system that grew out of real world practice. Nothing was wasted.

But no. I’m getting too excited over nothing. These are benches for carpentry. They might have been functional, but they were also temporary, cheap, and disposable. 

That’s when I thought too, but the pictures tell a different story. Any woodworker can read the patterns of wear on these benches, especially the marks around the vices. These aren’t months’ worth of marks, they’re decades’ worth. And the benches might have been made of cheap materials, but those fancy vices didn’t come cheap. The men who built these benches were invested in them. Invested enough that more than a century after most of them were built, the vices are still attached. The photos show benches that saw years and years of hard use and still survived long enough to be photographed and put online.

So, can we do fine woodworking on these? I think so. After all, a joiner made furniture at least some of the time. And even the “house joiner” worked to a high standard just outfitting houses with staircases and entryways.  I’ve made a handful of doors myself and the work is no joke. You need tight joints, flat stock, and a very good work surface. 

So let’s build one. 

Last week, I bought the stock to try one of these screwed-together contraptions. I brought home a stack of southern yellow pine 2x10s, a pair of Douglas fir posts, and some 2x4s. It’s all sitting down in the shop, neatly stacked for maximum air flow. It should take about 2 weeks to settle down.

I’ve designed the bench and it really will go together with a few fasteners and simple joints. Will the end product be any good? I honestly have no idea, but I’ve gotten a little bit obsessed with this bench and now, I’ve just got to have one.

Stick with me. This is going to be interesting.