Roubo Build #1: Wherein our protagonist drinks the crazy juice, and decides to use 4/4 lumber.
So brief background is that about a 18 months ago, I bought a small load of lumber off ebay from a local seller. While there, I ended up also buying 350 BF of flatsawn white ash for $100. I figured, even if it ends up being ‘test’ pieces and shop projects, it would still be worth it. Fast forward to recently, and I’ve been planning to build a new bench, and I’ve pretty much decided on a Roubo.
I picked up the lovely Benchcrafted tail/wagon vise, a german bench screw for a leg vise, and some Grammercy Tool holdfasts.
My local attempts to find SYP failed miserably. Then I considered 8/4 ash. Both places I went to had suboptimal supplies, and by my calculations, I’d end up wasting something like 70% of the raw board footage, and at ~$3.00/bf, thats a lot of change.
I then considered the 4/4 stock that I had. It was cut pretty generously…. A couple of beers later, I was able to dismiss in my head all of the additional work involved in not using the same dimensioned stock as in the Christopher Schwarz Workbenches book, it seemed like a real genius idea.
Aside from picking through some of the ash for the weird grain patterns, and saving for later..
I did manage to grab the stock closest to 5″ and get it cut to a workable size, jointed and planed.
I’ve got all my leg stock cut and glued up, and it only took me 5 layers to get a hair shy of 5″ square legs. They’re about 33″ long, to leave some extra room for trimming later.
I think this is doable.
Lets see if I can survive the top though!
