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I'm about to build a toolchest, and once that's done I'm hoping to have time to build a portable workbench that I can use in the basement for the winter. The two obvious plans are either the one Paul Sellers uses, modified to be easy to knock down, or the Roy Underhill plan from The Woodwright's Apprentice. Both have already been modified to be easily portable, so that's a solved problem. Either way it will be fairly small (on the order of 60"x20"), and made as inexpensively as possible, which means mostly construction lumber. This will be pretty much entirely for hand-tool use, which is why I'm posting in this sub-forum.
The big problem I'm facing in design, though, is how uneven the floor is. When my normal bench was down there, I ended up having to shim two of the legs, and if the bench shifted a quarter inch I had to re-shim. I sat down yesterday to consider, and realized I was sitting on my three-legged sawbench, which is solid no matter how uneven the floor is.
So: my current thought is that no matter which design I go with, I'll angle the legs slightly out towards the ends of the bench. Not a lot: maybe 10 degrees. I'm thinking two legs on the left end, since that's where I'll be doing most of the work, and the end I'll generally be planing towards, and a single leg on the right end, reinforced with diagonal braces coming from the benchtop down to around halfway down the leg. I'm imagining something like a timber-frame knee-brace type joint on each side of the leg. That should give a certain amount of front-to-back stability, while still allowing three-footed stability.
If anyone has any thoughts, or has tried it and can point out some problems I've overlooked, I'd love to hear them.
The big problem I'm facing in design, though, is how uneven the floor is. When my normal bench was down there, I ended up having to shim two of the legs, and if the bench shifted a quarter inch I had to re-shim. I sat down yesterday to consider, and realized I was sitting on my three-legged sawbench, which is solid no matter how uneven the floor is.
So: my current thought is that no matter which design I go with, I'll angle the legs slightly out towards the ends of the bench. Not a lot: maybe 10 degrees. I'm thinking two legs on the left end, since that's where I'll be doing most of the work, and the end I'll generally be planing towards, and a single leg on the right end, reinforced with diagonal braces coming from the benchtop down to around halfway down the leg. I'm imagining something like a timber-frame knee-brace type joint on each side of the leg. That should give a certain amount of front-to-back stability, while still allowing three-footed stability.
If anyone has any thoughts, or has tried it and can point out some problems I've overlooked, I'd love to hear them.