Benchmark

First major project of the year: the bench. Just laying out the main timbers and realizing the workshop floor has a bit of slope to it, front to back; but not a problem, as it ain't by much. The timber is from an old house on the Menai Strait, which I got whilst gardening there, over twenty years ago: they were in the process of [very expensively] renovating the Victorian place, and the ballroom floor got the chop in favour of some obscenely pricey new hardwood replacement. The existing pitch-pine boards - twenty-one-foot long! - ended up as the living room floor in the house we lived in before our current place, and a couple of the joists ended up in storage. When JC & I built our potting-shed back in 2003, some of that joist timber ended up supporting - still does - the structure's base, and the remainder wound up as my bench therein.

However, the shed never became the little workshop I imagined it might, and so the bench remained as a repository for general clutter until last week, when I decided on a rebuild in the studio. Those who follow YouTubers who host 'shop skills' channels - myself included, I might add - will probably point out the crude nature of my bench's construction. It is based on my father's bench - albeit well more than twice the size in its current form, at around ten-and-a-half feet long - from my childhood home: a general purpose affair that will be as much at home with metalwork as well as wood, and which will house an assortment of both metal and wood vises, my pillar drill and my bench planer. The space between the rear of the nine-inch bench top will be boarded out to be a tool-well, and storage above and below created to take all my tools, aside from the lathe stuff, which will remain in the small lathe shop at the other end of the studio. There's much to be done, but the beautiful weather this afternoon, and the clamour of birdsong in the garden, has been a much-need fillip to stir the old bones into action for it all! Keep you posted...