It's a workbench!

I cut and fit the wellboard piece between the benchtop and the rear apron. The original plan called for a tongue-and-groove joint on both sides of the wellboard, but this seemed like a very difficult joint to do well over such a length, even if I had a fully functional plough plane and rebate plane (which I do not). So in the end I decided not to do the groove at all, and just fit the wellboard in. If this turns out to allow too much flex in the bench overall, I can always install battens against the rear apron and screw the wellboard to those.

It wouldn’t be a terrible idea to get some quadrant beading to run along the top of the wellboard just to make it a bit easier to keep it clean. I’ve noticed that there is already a fair bit of debris accumulating inside the small gap on either side of the wellboard.

Then I moved on to installing the vise. The first step was to lay out and cut a hole for the back of the vise to slide in to. From watching Paul’s video, it seemed like getting enough of a cut to start sawing was a major hassle, so I borrowed a jigsaw from my Dad for this part. It’s not important that the hole be exact or pretty, so I wasn’t bothered about whether it would be a bit crude.

The jigsaw was pretty useful, but slow going. If I needed to make a similar cut in future, I would probably use the jigsaw just to establish enough of a cut for me to get my handsaw in, and use the handsaw the rest of the way as it is much faster.

Then it was just a matter of mounting the vise through the hole, installing a few screws and getting the bench back upright.

vise underside — The vise installed, underside view

bench with vise — The complete bench with the vise

Now I just need to install the jaw liners in the vise to get it fully armed and operational. I had originally bought a piece of decking hardwood to be the vise liner, but on further consideration I decided that the grooves cut into the underside of the timber would look stupid and annoy me. So I need to source some plain 19 x 90mm hardwood for this task.

Lessons learned

Make sure your hands are fully clear before you trigger the quick release on a vise you’ve got sitting vertically. I got rid of a good amount of skin off my knuckle by failing to heed this lesson today.

What’s next

Installing the vise liners.
Making and installing the wedge retainers.
Adding beading to the wellboard.