A workbench is greater than only a flat floor—it’s your work associate, your artistic platform, and, let’s be trustworthy, typically a really costly junk collector. The bench is the place tasks come to life, instruments pile up, and good concepts (and dangerous ones) get examined. However what a workbench ought to be has modified lots through the years, and that’s precisely what I’ll be speaking about.
Gone are the times when each respectable workbench needed to be an enormous slab constructed from three oak timber and weighing greater than a small automotive. Don’t get me fallacious—I like a traditional Roubo bench as a lot as the subsequent hand-tool nerd. However someplace alongside the way in which, we began appearing like bench design peaked within the 18th century and that something lighter or completely different was by some means inferior.
Enter the fashionable workbench—extra particularly, the MFT (multifunction desk). These benches are wonderful within the fashionable store. They’re lighter, usually modular, and designed to deal with a wide range of duties, whether or not you’re hand-cutting dovetails or breaking down a sheet of plywood with a observe noticed. They’re not only a floor to work on; they’re a workholding system, a clamping grid, and a versatile platform that adapts to the job at hand.
What I like most in regards to the MFT fashion is how approachable it’s. You don’t want a 400-sq.-ft. devoted store to make one work. In the event you’re a minimalist understanding of a single-car storage, an MFT can fold up, roll away, and even double as a ending desk. It’s the bench for individuals who need operate first.
However right here’s the factor: The workbench dialog isn’t nearly custom versus know-how. It’s about rethinking what you really need out of your bench. Do you airplane boards by hand for hours on finish? Or do you principally minimize, sand, and assemble with the assistance of energy instruments? Are you transferring your bench round, or does it reside in a single spot? Your solutions to these questions ought to form what your bench appears to be like like—not a 250-year-old drawing from a French woodworking handbook.
In my lecture on this subject at Woodworking in America this 12 months, I like to combine in some laughs, a couple of sturdy opinions, and a few reside demonstrations of simply how succesful these fashionable benches could be. My purpose isn’t to persuade you to throw out your Roubo, however to get you considering critically in regards to the bench you’ve—or the bench you propose to construct—so it really fits the way in which you’re employed at the moment.
As a result of on the finish of the day, a bench isn’t only a piece of furnishings. It’s the guts of your store. And whether or not that coronary heart is a conventional beast or a light-weight MFT, the necessary factor is that it really works for you.
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