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2WORKBENCHHere is a good hacckinge stoccke;on this you may hewe and knocke.—Mystery Play of Noah's Ark, fifteenth century

23Ho w would you fit boards tightly together If you did not have awoodworking plane?You might use an adze or hatchet—first scribing the jointwith a compass or overlapping the boards and marking them.with a scratch awl. Or you might rub one of the surfaces with charcoaland then press it against the other. Then you would chop only themarked areas, repeating the process by trial and error until the surfaceswere perfectly fitted together.You could also fit them by repeatedly running a saw kerf down theimperfect junction. This would subtract from each surface only in theplaces where the boards were closely abutted. Where there were gaps,the saw would pass along without making any impression. When the sawteeth cut both surfaces along their whole lengths the two pieces should fitperfectly. A sawhorse or two would be all that you needed.The alternative to custom matching the serendipitous contours of theboards, each to the other, is to bring all surfaces to the one shape that willmatch any other like itself. You sacrifice individuality for the convenienceof this abstract constant. The solution, in both senses, is the plane.But, since the glory days of Rome, when the woodworking planeappeared, working with planes has meant working on a suitable bench—not just to provide a flat, elevated surface but to somehow hold the workso that both hands are free to use the plane. To enter the era of modernjoinery, you must have both planes and a bench to use them on.CLAVES A N D M O R T I C I N G STOOLSThe road from chopping block to joiner's bench has many stops alongthe way. Other woodworking operations besides planing need the work tobe held more solidly than under foot, knee, or derriere. Wooden shoemakers and pulley block makers both use augers and gouges in theirwork. And both use a heavy, four-legged bench called by the blockmakers, a clave. The strength of the clave is its simplicity. Basically, it isno more than a log with a big notch in the top where you place the work.Wedges driven between the work and the end walls of the notch lockeverything in place.Chairmakers use low, heavy benches to hold pieces as they shape themand cut the joints in them for assembly. The bench Illustrated in 1775 bythe French master woodturner Hulot is basically the same as those stillused by Windsor chair makers in England and by rural craftsmen inAppalachia. This bench differs from the clave in that the work is wedgedlengthwise between pegs set into the level top. It has the additionaladvantage of allowing the chairmaker to sit straddling the bench as heworks.Hulot's bench also accommodates the shaving of long pieces with adrawknife. The drawknife, like the plane, requires the free use of bothhands. Thus, as Joseph Moxon wrote in 1678, workmen "set one end[above]French sabot makers in Diderot'seighteenth-century Encyclopedic(1763)-[opposite The joiner's bench. Robert Watsonmaking a sash/br Anderson's forge.

24THE W O O D W R I G H T S W O R K B O O Kof their Work against their Breast, and the other against their Workbench, . . and so pressing the Work a little hard . . . keep it steady In itsPosition." The Hulot bench allows the worker to sit as he shaves, one endof the work set against the block on the end and the other against awooden breastplate. (This breastplate, incidentally, also served as thehead of the bit braces used to bore the holes for chair framing and wasregarded as something of a badge of office in English chairmakingdistricts.)[above]The ubiquitous chairmaker's framingbench, as shown by French woodturnerHulot in 1775.[below]The shaving horse in 1556 (Agricola,De Re Metaliicaj.SHAVING H O R S E SBreastplates and Botched benches are all right, but for true drawknifingpleasure, nothing beats the shaving horse. One of the earliest representations of this bench appears in the 1556 German metallurgy book byAgricola, De Re Metallica. Here, the craftsman is pictured using it toshave "fuzz-sticks" which will burn hot and fast down in the mines. Thisis hardly a sophisticated use of this device; yet perhaps it Is no accidentthat Agricola shows it in front of a shingle-covered structure. Holdingshingles for shaving Is Its traditional assignment, as in the 1845 American novel Margaret in which, amid a "pile of fresh, sweet-scented whiteshavings and splinters," sits "a draw-horse, on which Hash smooths andsquares his shingles."A shaving horse, or any bench, works well only if it fits the person whois using it. French woodworker Roubo, in his 1775 discussion of theshaving horse, relates how they must be made larger or smaller for thosewho are "plus grandes" or "'plus petits." They should be proportioned so

WORKBENCH25The horse in 1775 (Roubo, L'Art duMenuisierJ.

26T HE W O O D W R I G H T S W O R K B O O KVirginia shaving horse in the room whereStonewall Jackson died (photograph ca.1863).that "at the start of the stroke, your arms should be stretched, but notstiff, and at the end of the stroke, your body should always stay inbalance, and therefore, always in command."THE PLANING BENCHWhat's good for a drawknife Is not so good for a plane. The planingbench Is intended to support the work at a convenient height for planing,around 30 inches or so. But the basic units of joinery and cabinetmakingare boards—which are long, wide, and thin. What works to hold thenarrow face at the proper height will not do for the wide face. The basicjoiner's bench has two arenas of board holding, one on the front to workthe edges and one on the top to work the broad faces. The evolutionof the joiner's bench is essentially the increasing sophistication of themechanisms for holding the work in these two positions.HOLDFASTS A N D H O O K SEven the most basic bench, just four legs and a top, becomes wonderfullyversatile when provided with stops and holdfasts. The end of the boardthat you are planing simply needs to hit against something to keep it fromshooting off the end of the bench. On the top, this is usually a toothediron set into a wooden shaft running stiffly in a mortice through thebench top. Earlier stops were pounded directly into the bench top—even

W O R K B F . NC H27Hammering locks the holdfast in itsoversized hole in the bench top.Joiner's bench from Estonia uses leversrather than screws to operate Us two vises(after Viires, Woodworking in Estonia,1960).

28T H E W O O D W R I G H T'S W O R K B O O Ka big nail will do. This stop is customarily set through the left frontcorner of the bench, to accommodate the right-handed majority. No onecould mistake the meaning of a 1777 Virginia Gazette advertisementwhich described a runaway slave "named Harry, . . . by Trade a Cooperand Carpenter, when he works at a Bench, he works at the wrong end."The hook on the front needs a different configuration from the one ontop. This stop must act like a crevice to hold the board tight up againstthe front of the bench. The board must also be supported underneath bypegs which may be placed any of the vertical array of holes provided tosuit boards of differing widths. Because boards are different lengths aswell, these holes can be placed all along the bench front, or they may be asingle row on a vertical member which slides on tracks down the lengthof the bench.These holes on the front of the bench, and others in the top, may alsoserve as lodgements for that remarkable device, the holdfast. When thissimple L-shaped iron is set with its long arm loosely in a hole and theshort arm on the work, a single blow with the mallet will cause it tobecome cocked in the hole—as tight and secure as if it were bolted. Asingle strike on the back releases its grip. Its one disadvantage when usedon top of the bench is that it intrudes on the very surface which you wantto work. Small trouble when morticing, but always in the way of theplane.SCREW VISESThe bench illustrated by Moxon in 1678 is an ordinary hook and holdfast model, with the clumsy addition (obviously an afterthought) of adouble screw vise tacked on to the right front. As the ability to makewooden screws and the means to afford them grew in the eighteenthcentury, they slowly began to appear on workbenches. This represented areturn to the notch and wedge of the blockmaker's clave, except now thewedge was wrapped around a cylinder. The double screw front vise wasused on both of the large benches owned by the eighteenth-centurycabinetmaking family, the Dominys of Long Island. These beautifullysimple benches and some of the furniture produced on them may beseen today at the Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware.Two other types of front screw vises are the parallel bar type shown inPeter Nicholson's 1812 Mechanic's Companion (a remake of Moxon'sMechanick Exercises) and the vertical jaw vise illustrated by Roubo (andused on my own bench). Though written half a century earlier thanNicholson's, Roubo's book described an innovation that, in much of theworld, eventually became the standard on the woodworker's bench.

W O R K B E N C HT H E E N D VISE"Eventually" is the key word here. Over forty years later, in 1816,Roubo's countryman Bergeron would write that the end vise was still notcommon in Paris, even though "this ingenious device gives the advantageof enabling one to work on three faces of the clamped work." The endvise does this by pinching the board between two stops on the bench top,eliminating the intrusion of the holdfast. Bergeron also appreciated theopening of the end vise "to hold a piece perpendicularly. Cabinetmakersuse it for sawing sheets of veneer, straight and mitred tenons, and forclamping small pieces after gluing."These benches with end vises are commonly called "Germanbenches," because, according to Roubo, "either it was invented in Germany or, which is more likely, by the German cabinetmakers, which arenumerous in Paris." There are occasional assertions that this form wasknown in Germany as a "French bench" (in the sort of extra-nationalattribution usually reserved for social diseases). In any case, it has alwaysbeen more popular on the continent of Europe—and in melting-potAmerica—than in Britain.Roubo's German bench has the usual vise on the front, with an adjustable bottom strut to keep the jaws parallel on different sizes of work. Italso has an unusual second vise that slides in tracks. Its legs, which are29Moxon's bench from i6j8 (MechanickExercises).

30THE W O O D W R I G H T S W O R K B O O K[right]Nicholson's bench from his 1812Mechanic's Companion.IbelowJA copy of the Nicholson bench at theAnthony Hay shop in ColonialWittiamsburg.morticed only three-quarters of the way through the thickness of the top,are superior to those of common benches, which, he noted, are morticed"all the way through, because It is the custom."

W O R K B E N C H31[above]Roubo's "German" bench from the 17705carries the new vise on its rivhl end.[left]A sophisticated Moravian bench withcharacteristic tusk tenons at Old Salem,North Carolina.THE H A R D PLACEThe common thread in all of these benches is solidity. Energy expendedin deformations of the bench is wasted. You cannot work long or well at abench that flexes under the passage of the plane or that bounces underthe blows of the mallet. The big bench in the Domlny shop stands 2 9 2inches tall on 4 by 4 legs. The top, excluding the lo-inch-wide backshelf, measures 12 feet long, ijVi inches wide, and over 5 inches thick—a single piece of oak for generations of work.