Backstory: I've got this great new house with a 700²ft garage/workshop. I'm trying to make some sense of the workshop area, as I'm gearing up to add a 12'x12' office in one corner of the garage (I have a son on the way, so my current office is going to become his nursery room). As it is right now I have a decent worktable but as I'm sure you all know there is never enough workspace. Also, I have a nice miter saw which is currently a pain to use due to the fact that it is just bolted to a piece of plywood on a sawhorse. I figured since I'm going to be framing up this new room soon, I might as well build myself a new workbench, as well as a miter table to make cutting all my lumber a lot easier. Then I decided to take it a step further and build the miter table into the workbench and include a place for lumber storage. With that in mind I opened up Sketchup. This is the result: The irony of the situation is that the miter table would be soooo much easier to build if I had a miter table to build it with. Here is how I've been using my miter saw up to now: As you can see, it isn't very easy to use that way. To cut long pieces of lumber I have to make a stack of wood at one end just to hold the board up. So I made up all my plans, made a list of all the parts I would need and threw them into a program called CutList. You tell the program what lengths you need and what size lumber you have and it will print up a list of how to make your cuts using the least amount of lumber. Looks something like this: With my bill of materials in hand I head on down to my local lumber shop. And here is the result: After a lot of tricky balancing on my so-called "miter table" I was able to cut it all up into the sizes I need. Here is the almost finished stack: Now that everything is cut to size, I'm ready to start assembling. While at the lumber yard I picked up a 2lb box of 2 1/2" deck screws, and 1lb of 1 5/8" screws. I started off with the main bench part, making the front and back faces which will then be put together like so: The way I've joined the frames to the legs takes up a lot of screws (about 6 screws for each corner) but is EXTREMELY sturdy. It will need to be considering I intend for this table to hold up several hundreds of pounds of lumber and tools. Here is my dog Hudson watching me work: So now that the main bench frame is complete, I moved on to the smaller bench. It is put together the same way, just on a smaller scale: With the two benches complete all that remains of the frame is the shelf that the miter saw sits on. The shelf itself is actually very simple: I varied a little bit from my original design here, in the sketchup diagram I made, all that connected the two benches together was this single shelf. I decided for extra stability to connect the two benches at the bottom as well. Here is the completed frame: Now on to the work surface. I dragged out two sheets of 1/2" plywood, and with the frame complete I actually had a place to cut it on To ensure a perfectly straight cut I clamped down another board to act as a fence for the circular saw. After the top surface was completed and attached, it was on to the bottom shelf. Since the two benches were now connected I decided to do the bottom shelf in one single piece, cutting out indentations for where the frame had to pass through: To get it in place I just had to tilt it and slide it through one end. And now for the completed product! Ta da! Total cost on this project was about $40. $27 for lumber and about $13 for the screws. I already had the plywood on hand. Any comments? When I get the energy in a few days I might tweak the sketchup file to include dimensions and release it along with a sort of "do it yourself" guide to making your own version of this table. Not that it's anything special, but despite it's simplicity it is actually a very rugged and useful design. Happy modding
I do work for my school theater, and when they got their new shop (old school kitchen, as they built a new lunchroom to hold more, ironiclly new lunchroom actually holds less people), the built a huge table along one side and built the same type of thing. They also added dust collection system to it and one other thing that may or may not work for you. Along the edge of the saw guide, the added a 2x4 (you could use a 2x2, 1x2, whatever you have on hand) to add a 12 foot guide to the saw. Then they stalped an old tape measure on to it (0 would be the blade all the way down to the end of the 2x4). It is great for making quick cuts, and it also gives you something you can screw another 2x4 to saw a bunch of boards to equal lengths. Looks great though. If we had the space here at my house, we would have the same thing for the miter saw, and a table for the table saw, and maybe something for the radial arm saw
I was actually considering something like that, but I intend to use the workbench for other purposes as well, and that would just get in the way. Although if I can figure away to make it easily attacheable/detacheable I might consider it. Thanks for the comment!
nice bench. i've been so busy making shelving i hadn't thought of benches yet, you have reminded me of some i built 20 years ago for a place i worked at. i'll use your idea when i do, as i have a similar cut off saw.
