Making a Workbench: Planing the Surfaces

HI!

First step is, I think, cleaning up the surfaces so I can figure out what I've got. I'll choose the "best" surface for the top, and the other side will be the underneath of the workbench surface. I won't have to do as much work on the underneath as I will on the top, but still, I'll have to clean it and flatten it so that I can attach the workholding devices to a solid surface.

This is the planed "top" of the workbench. I don't know yet that it will be the top because I haven't had a chance to check the other surface yet, but it looks pretty good once cleaned up. There's one gouge out of the surface that will have to be fixed, and a couple of stains that I might take out, but overall pretty solid with only one full-thickness crack in it.

Planing by hand isn't complicated; using the largest plane I have (18"), and working from one side of the surface, I plane across the grain from one end to the other and back. Each stroke is full-width and overlaps the prior pass by about 1/2. The size of the sole plate of the plane ensures that I knock the high spots off pretty evenly across the surface. The cross-grain planing is repeated from the other side of the surface.

Then, using the same large sole plate plane, I plane from one side end-to-end in a herringbone pattern. This takes out some of the cross-grain roughness. The patina is beginning to come off. I repeat the herringbone from the other side.

Then, using a smaller plane, I plane along the long direction to start smoothing. All in all, about three hours of hacking on the top gets me to a place where it's flat and reasonably clean!

CHEERS!

Phil