Sometimes I make things: preface to the bench
My father has been a hobbyist woodworker all my life. Now that he's retired, he finally has a nice shop set up in the basement with a lot of space. Most of his tools are fairly good, as many of them are hand-me-downs (hand-me-ups?) from my brother-in-law, who does woodwork professionally. (Less so now, because of the decreasing relative value of craftsmanship in the modern world. That's another post, coming later, and this is me marking it so I'll have to follow up and eventually write it.) My father is trying to organise his shop so that he can work in it more easily and productively, and he decided to build a proper workbench.
To help him with the project, I searched for workbench plans. He has about a decade and a half of old issues of Wood magazine. After finding half a dozen different designs and plans, I showed him the articles. He picked a design and noted a sidebar to the article that said building a top was tricky. The article suggested buying a ready-made top for around $300 and building the rest. Because I'm me, I went to Amazon and bought a book: Workbenches: From Design and Theory to Construction and Use. Because that's what one does on a new project, right? buy a book and research the theory and history. Obviously. That's where it all went complicated.
One of the benches in that book can be built without a whole lot of skill, and the author, Christopher Schwarz, made a good case (and built) a really nice traditional bench from box-store lumber. For me, the real incentive was that it was dirt cheap. I learned to use Sketchup, started drawing plans, and convinced my father that we should do this. I tried to just offer an option, but in my enthusiasm I worry that I might have pushed a bit. All of that happened back in June. I think we bought the lumber in September. Thus begins the small saga.