Old woodworker's table
I’ve finished refreshing my new workshop - old furniture thrown out, holes in walls puttied and painted cinnamon-red, electrical connections organised. Time to move in with tools and stuff!
Peter has left me his old woodworker’s table. It was mounted under roof but outside, exposed to weather and varying humidity and in rather neglected state.
I fell in love with it instantly! Finally a proper woodworking bench! It was convenient to have it outside for dirty jobs but I’d rather take it into workshop and build some temporary table here for occasional dirty jobs.
Legs to the bench turned out to be in better condition.
Wooden vices are operational but need some love to shine again.
I like how worn-out this thing is but I don’t like dirt and spilled paint all over the place so I’ve decided to sand it to reveal clean wood but without excessive patina removal.
Orbital sander with 60 & 80 paper, some hand sanding in corners and the bench started to look even more promising. I noticed that there are at least 4 types of wood used to build it: pine, some hardwood for vices and pegs (Acacia? Beechwood?), mahogany in tool-rest cavity and walnut for vice screws. All quoter-sawn so even though it stands outside in weather it did not deform nor split.
For proper cleaning I needed to disassemble the big vice.
Cover plate is nailed with wooden nails, formed as teardrops. I even found a shim inside!
To release the screw one needs to unlock wooden lock plate. Neat!
Sanding took one day but once finally done it was followed by oiling. I use a mixture of cold-pressed linseed oil, turpentine and rests of Epifanes varnish. This mixture is in fact leftover after few seasons of varnishing: I don’t clean my brushes, I dope them into turpentine to remove most of the varnish and then put them in a jar filled with linseed oil. Here they wait until I need them again, staying soft and ready for action. At such occasions the oil mixture gets usage and is replaced by clean and fresh oil.
Soaking with oil took few hours until wood didn’t want to drink more. I cleaned the excess with cotton rag (doped into water afterward to avoid risk of self-ignition). It turned out really well.
Legs were disassembled, cleaned and also oiled.
Vice mechanism was cleaned, oiled and assembled back.
Leg joinery requires 3 wedges to lock all components together. They were missing so I made new ones from mahogany offcuts.
To remove the bench from its current place I built a cart matching bench’s height above the ground. This way, with a bit of help from my girls, I could transport the bench closer to workshop.
Lowered onto steel-pipe rollers could be then pushed into the workshop.
Finally connected with legs it matched perfectly and sits now in it’s new place.
Wooden screws got soaked with oil and cleaned but I didn’t sand them. I’ve decided to leave their worn-out surface as a sign of time and usage. I like how they look. They were soaking oil like sponges!
All assembled and ready for another 100 years of usage!