I wanted to do some woodworking. Any good woodworker needs a good woodworking bench before he can do any woodworking. Any good woodworker will design and build his own workbench. Most of my friends would call this deadlock. The rest of you would call it a Catch-22. After I realized that the 'deadlock' excuse wasn't getting me out of doing the dishes, I decided to go ahead and attempt to build a workbench without a workbench. Here are my awesome plans. Us fancy woodworkers call that graph paper. I picked it up at my carpentry-supply store, Target.

This is the parts list I generated from my design. Notice all of the notches. My goal is to build this workbench without using any hardware (screws, nails, bolts), so I designed all of the joints to be mortice/tenon joints.

It took me a couple weeks to settle on this design. The hard part was visualizing what the table would look like based on my 2D design. After I had it all done, I had the following conversation with Nate:
Nate: I find Google Sketchup to be very useful for visualizing a design before you start building.
Troy: Google Whatnow?
Nate: You can get it for free on the Internet.
Troy: Inter-whatnow?

This is what Sketchup does for you. I was able to figure out the tool and recreate my design from memory in about 45 minutes. Thanks a lot, Nate. You got any more advice that will help me out yesterday?

Time to start building. I setup a temporary shop in the garage. Then I realized that sawhorses and plywood were good enough and gave up on the whole thing. Can you guess what the most useful tools are in this picture? You might be leaning towards the mitre or table saws. Nope. The speed squares...those triangles on the temp-table. They are the best things ever. Clamps are nice, too. As you'll see later, I'm kind of a clamp collector.

After chopping all of the lumber to length, I started chiseling out those mortices. The woodworker's way is to make a bunch of parallel slices across the mortice to the appropriate depth, smash out the pieces with a hammer, then use a chisel to smooth out the surface. I have 4 of them lined up here in the post-hammer, pre-chisel state. It took me 30 minutes to chisel out one of them. This was going to take awhile. But hey, I was experiencing woodworking the way my ancestors would have done it.

My ancestors were idiots. This is where the neighbor with the router comes in handy. He's moving later this summer, so all future projects will have to be done sans router.

After multiple nights with a router and a shop-vac, I was ready to start assembling the table. I've never seen so much sawdust. I had to dump out my shop-vac because it was, literally, full of sawdust.

Ta da! Hmm. I was expecting it to be longer. Guess I should have measured twice before cutting. Anyway, the leg pieces have been joined using glue and dowels. The horizontal pieces are just there to verify the mortice sizes.

Here, I'm putting in the first stretchers. This should have been a two-person job. I asked for Kristen's help, but she refused. (I know! Here I helped her make two babies and she won't help me make a workbench.) The only way I could figure out how to do this was to turn the legs horizontal and slide things in from the top. As you can see, I'm using the same approach here. Zing!

Even though the mortice/tenon joints are pretty tight, there's still some wiggle room. So we square things up and then insert a couple dowels across the joint. That top 2x4 is just a spacer for the notch.

The frame is almost complete. All that's left are the two horizontal pieces across the width to keep everything square (Part D in the list). There are eight, count them, eight clamps visible in this image. There are three more long clamps that you can't see. I have eleven freakin' clamps. The orange ones you see are pipe clamps. I used to see those in the store and think they were for clamping pipes. I was totally wrong. You buy just the orange part for about $13 and then buy whatever length pipe you want to assemble the clamp. For example, my 4-foot pipe clamp cost me $13 for the clamping piece and $7 for the 4-foot pipe. That's $20. A 4-foot Irwin or Craftsman quick-clamp costs $40. If I find that I need a 6-foot clamp someday, I can just pay $10 for the 6-foot pipe and not re-spend the $13.

Part D goes across the width and a dowel finishes things off. The frame is now complete. It seems pretty solid. I can't make it flex in any direction. Once I add that wicked top, it'll probably be able to survive a nuclear strike.