Lots of folks I’ve read here and elsewhere seem to feel strongly that benches are best kept against walls for several reasons. Increased stability and the extra natural light that one can get if the wall has windows are two of the main reasons I’ve heard. Both of these are great reasons, especially if your bench is on the light side or unstable for some other reason, and assuming you have decent windows in your shop (e.g., not likely in a garage or basement).
I built a version of the Fortune/Nelson bench (featured in the Landis book) a few years back as I knew I wanted a middle shop bench. I was convinced by Landis’ description of the thoughts that guided the design were sound as far the ability to clamp all around over and under and otherwise approach the bench from all angles.
So I was doing a panel squaring operation today on a panel that was just a bit unwieldy for my TS sled, and I thought: “This is why I love having my bench in the center with access to both sides!” So I took a couple of pictures to demonstrate what I see as some of the major benefits of middle shop – “out from the wall” – placement.
1. you double the coveted bench front property because both sides are “fronts” depending upon your point of view. The “back-front” has no vices, but that can be an advantage at times.
2. you can have under bench storage that is accesible from both sides – and in my case, doesn’t interfere with or compromise my tail vise’s operation (see pic).
3. I can saw from the opposite side of my front vise (see pic) – this comes in handy all the time.
4. I can set up jigs like my panel squaring jig in the pics easily – clamping across – over – under whatever is called for.
5. When I clamp a large panel with the tail vice and dogs, I can plane from both sides of the bench as well as the end.
This list of variations on these themes is endless, but I thought I’d mention some specifics as to why I love having my bench in the middle of the shop.
A few pics here:
http://good-times.webshots.com/album/561783809sCWTvL
Replies
"Lots of folks I've read here and elsewhere seem to feel strongly that benches are best kept against walls..."
I don't recall ever seeing such a statement Samson, and certainly I'm not an advocate of the practice. I find woodworking benches placed against the wall a pain in the pants and very restrictive for the work I do, which is often large. Certainly the main bench for making such larger items of furniture is always best set up well away from walls if possible, for all the reasons you listed and more.
There are times when the only option is to site the bench against a wall: restricted space is the main reason I can think of. This of course limits the kind of woodworking possible. This may be a conscious preference to suit the type of woodworking done. Then there are specialised use benches, such as sharpening benches and small parts benches that do work well against a wall. Slainte.
Richard Jones Furniture
See Rule 10 and Problem 10 in this article:
http://www.popularwoodworking.com/articledisplay?id=14875
Stuff in many threads, like this one:
http://forums.taunton.com/fw-knots/messages?msg=24247.24
Anyway, it seemed many folks thought the wall better. I just thought I'd try to give some concrete advantages I find in not being a wallflower. ;-)
I agree with you about the advantages of having access to all sides of the bench for working and clamping. However, my bench, a Sjoberg from Woodcraft a number of years ago, will not stay in place when doing heavy planing. So I keep moving it in and out. In Sept. I will be building the Holtzapffel bench with Chris Schwartz at Kelly Mehler. Hopefully, this will be massive enough to not walk away from me.
Cool! Are you going to invest in the $125 apiece wooden screws for the front vise?
And when you see Chris, ask him why on his tail vice he left the rear jaw uncovered and flush instead of lined with wood or buried in the top somehow?
I may be a Neanderthal only up to a point. I will be using a modern vise.
Samson, as I said before, I'd never seen anyone recommend putting a bench against a wall until I read the article you linked me to. I can't ever recall reading an article by Chris Scwartz before, although I've heard he has well respected opinions and information on workbenches, and I have seen a few of his posts here and there.
I strongly disagree with the bench against a wall thing. I don't know any working furniture makers that would agree it's a 'good thing', although I admit I don't know every furniture maker in the world, ha, ha. It's a completely impractical place to put a bench unless you only work on small items, and in the thirty odd years of my working life I've always worked with the bench away from the wall, away from columns and any other interfering bits as much as possible.
Any time I've been allocated a bench against a wall I've either shifted it out as soon as possible, or moved to another bench in the middle of the workshop, unless it's been impossible to move either the bench or myself elsewhere for whatever reason.
Here's the sort of set up I like. Tools in boxes against the wall, a space, then the bench, then more space. Ideal for me. Slainte.View ImageRichard Jones Furniture
Sam,
My bench is heavy enough that I thought I wouldn't need to anchor it down. But I found that the rhythmic romping of planing made it want to walk around, even tho I couldn't push it around. So I fastened it to the wall. One major advantage of having a wall right behind the bench, (aside from the light from a window,) is the convenience of having shelves and other hangers right there for frequently used hand tools. I have chisels arrayed along the back of the bench. Above them, are shelves where I keep scrapers, block planes, beeswax for lubing screws, spokeshaves, brace bits, pins and plugs, wedges,. Below the shelving hang hammers, mallets, coping and fretsaws and blades, combination square and accessories, set ( "T" bevel) squares, compasses, birdsmouth boards for fretsawing. Above those shelves, quite high, are other shelves for molding, compass and other specialty planes, the carving tool roll, with bitbraces, tenon, back and compass saws, benchbrush, and drawknives hanging below them.
Granted all this could be stored elsewhere quite well, but I feel it has saved more than a few steps while working at the bench.
Every shop I've worked in has had workbenches against the walls, with an "assembly table" or at least a pair of horses, freestanding a step or two away. If space isn't a premium, I think this accomodates the worker's need sometimes to have access to the vices, dogs, etc of the bench, to fit and adjust component, while being able to clamp and have access to all sides of the project as it comes together. The best of both worlds, as it were.
Ray
Now there you go Ray, immediately after my post you go and contradict me. You must be the first working furniture maker I've come across that likes the bench against the wall set-up.
Oh well. Are you the exception that proves the rule? Or do I just need to go and get a drink, and watch all the other bench against the wall fans vilify me for my heretical position-- in the middle of the workshop, away from the wall, ha, ha?
Perhaps I just need to keep my back to the wall? Slainte. Richard Jones Furniture
Sgian,
Hey, I am back. Long hiatus from woodworking while living in a rented apartment waiting for my house to get built.
I agree the optimal configuration is the bench that is approachable from both sides with a set of dog holes on both sides so you can work both sides of the bench. The movers busted the tool tray off one side of the bench- probably a blessing as it kept me away from that edge. The ninny hammmers also broke off my end vise which was held on with 8/4 ash which was lag bolted on with 5/8 bolts.
Regards
Frank
Hi Richard,
I expect, like most things craftwise, it all depends on how one is taught. As I said, my experience in working other shops, two of which were established in the early years of the last century (Gaw I feel old now!) was at benches that had been against the walls since day one I'd guess. Clearly a case of "That's where benches have always been."
As far as accessing all sides of a project, heck I just whirl the object around on the bench if I need to get to the other side. Or else, it's on the assembly table. If I'm planing a panel that is wider than the bench, I support the near side that's hanging over with a "dead man". The top of the bench is around 20" wide, with a 9" or so tool well in back. So about the only thing that hangs over is the odd banquet table top.
Seriously, it seems that the two approaches reflect different notions of what a bench is for. I think of the bench as a place for working on components, with a separate place nearby for assembly work, where the piece itself is worked on. Primarily, this is because the height of my bench is such that a case piece standing on it is uncomfortably high to apply molding, fit drawers, etc. Conversely, it'd be back-breaking for me to plane stock, carve, etc on stuff held at the height of my assembly table top.
If your back is always against the wall, then I can see why your bench needs be in the middle of the shop. A round shop might even be necessary, so they can't get you cornered! And sitting back and having a drink is always a good idea.
Regards,
Ray
I too prefer my bench against a wall for a couple reasons.
1) I tend not to use my tail vise for planing. Occasionally a work piece spins out of control. Were the bench free standing it would fly off the bench cleaning the surface of any chisels, gouges bevels etc.
2) Though my bench is not fastened to the wall, the wall lends support in the direction the bench is weakest, i.e. perpendicular to the bench's long front edge. Its not that my 300lb bench is weak or built poorly. But the wall provides near infinite stiffness, unachievable with any conventional bench design. The advantage of this design is sawing or doing other rough work.
3) Ray talked about tool storage. I agree with that.
4) Its certainly more space efficient to have your bench against the wall.
5) As a cabinetmaker, I don't see a lot of work that is bigger than my bench. I have made a few tables whose tops were bigger. In those cases, I pulled my bench away from the wall, squeezing between the wood rack and the chisel rack attached to my wall.
I think the biggest differentiator is whether you work by hand or not. If you are clamping down a panel to work its edges with a router, a free standing assembly table seems best for the task. But when you are working by hand with planes and saws, most folks seem to prefer their benches against walls.
Adam
I think that ideally you should put a bench in the middle of the floor and have it as big as an aircraft carrier flight deck (and in some of the shops the shop articles cover you could too) But for most of us space is an issue so the bench gets smaller, and for some of us we have no choice but to put it against the wall. I could put it in the center of the space but I would not be able to have a TS then so...
Doug
Thanks, Adam, for helping to present the "wall" perspective. One thing though, I am very much a mixed woodworker as I think the vast majority of hobbiests are. Pure Neanders or pure Norms exist no doubt, but are not the norm. I do not find my free standing bench inferior when doing just about any hand tool task you can name - and I do many of them often from cutting dovetails to planing panels to using molding planes, etc.
1) I tend not to use my tail vise for planing. Occasionally a work piece spins out of control. Were the bench free standing it would fly off the bench cleaning the surface of any chisels, gouges bevels etc.
I must confess, I've never had this happen. I use my tail vise for planing too, of course.
2) ... But the wall provides near infinite stiffness, unachievable with any conventional bench design. The advantage of this design is sawing or doing other rough work.
If I'm handsawing large pieces, I'm using my sawbenches. Most sawing that takes place on my bench is joinery work and benchhook type stuff. Never had the bench budge during any of these operations.
3) Ray talked about tool storage. I agree with that.
Many ways to sking that cat - I've got cabinets on the wall and a rolling cart under the bench (as shown in the photos) that I find likely as convenient and accessible as you all find your racks on the wall behind the bench.
4) Its certainly more space efficient to have your bench against the wall.
I don't see this as self-evident. I suppose it depends upon your space. One might see having access to another bench side as more efficient than say, having another table or bench to provide this workspace.
5) As a cabinetmaker, I don't see a lot of work that is bigger than my bench. I have made a few tables whose tops were bigger. In those cases, I pulled my bench away from the wall, squeezing between the wood rack and the chisel rack attached to my wall.
I don't want to be yanking my bench around. It's just oo heavy and usually cluttered with too much stuff.
I think the biggest differentiator is whether you work by hand or not. If you are clamping down a panel to work its edges with a router, a free standing assembly table seems best for the task. But when you are working by hand with planes and saws, most folks seem to prefer their benches against walls.
As I said at above, I don't see this as the key differentiator - perhaps if you work by hand exclusively? I work by hand plenty, and have yet to wish my bench were against a wall.
Again, thanks for the the comments.
Your post makes me think about the different schools of thought of woodworking. I like what you are thinking- you are asking why people say "put your bench against a wall because its best". I think there are reasons why people do that, but not everyone knows them who ascribe to this and its probably not appropriate for everyone. Its interesting to think this way. Everything is a puzzle to be understood. The other school of thought is apprentice-style. Do what you are told and you will understand why later (or never). This is a good approach because you don't have to puzzle out absolutely everything.Like you and probably everyone, I go back and forth between the different approaches, choosing my battles carefully. I took your approach with respect to benches. I've made several and positioned them differently. After 10 years, I've returned to a very traditional bench and position. I'm not sure whether it was worth my while to try everything or not. Adam
This is something I don't understand Adam. You're saying, if I've understood you correctly, that a bench against the wall is traditional. In my experience the very last place any of the old cabinetmakers I trained under at my first workshop would thank you for a bench positioned that way.
Every professional workshop I've worked in, and it's quite a few over the last three and a half decades, has generally made every effort to avoid the restrictive bench against a wall set-up. If a bench had to be set up that way because of limited space, it was usually reserved for poor old 'last-in buggins'. Buggins always got away from the 'Sucker's Bench' as soon as another cabinetmaler left. Then the next new guy got lumbered with it, ha, ha.
It's all very puzzling as I don't understand these so diametrically opposed positions we have, and then there's Ray too coming in in support of the bench up against a wall. That sort of set-up has never been any good in any of the workshops I've been in, but perhaps I'm used to generally working on bigger items than many of the smaller scale pieces produced by some. It's not unusual in my experience for a screen, panels for chorister's pews, panels for built in furniture, wainscotting, a good sized table top, or a bank counter to span a couple or three benches as the parts are worked on.
Oh well. I guess things vary from place to place. Slainte. Richard Jones Furniture
Richard,
Just wanted you to know that I would prefer to have my bench free standing, not against the wall. I too trained with a woodworker who had all 3 of his benches free standing, it's nice to be able to get all around the bench.
In my case it's simply a matter of space and I do like the convenience of having all my handtools readily available, against the wall. I don't like having them in drawers under the bench.
Regards,Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
I'm with you Bob on the tool cabinets and benches. I can't stand any form of tool storage under or over a bench. I like an open frame under a bench with maybe a shelf spanning the stretchers. Above is a solid beech top about 3" or 4" thick, a tail vise, front vise, row of dogs and a tool well. I like the depth about 18"- 20" plus the added depth of a tool well about 6 " deep with the back lip at the same height as the main body of the bench, and the length roughly 80". That suits my work down to the ground. Slainte.
Richard Jones Furniture
Edited 12/17/2007 6:44 pm by SgianDubh
Richard,I don't think its a regional distinction. Larger shops from the 18th on had no choice but line up benches in front of the windows. Roubo has such a picture. But the master probably wouldn't work there. In small shops, all the period images show the benches against walls with tool storage there. I think there are/were practical reasons for this. Obviously these were 1 or 2 man shops and the benches could have been anywhere- not unlike our shops. But these guys chose wall mounted benches for some reason.My feeling is that the wall mount offers advantages particularly appealing to hand tool only woodworkers. Modern woodworkers who expect to have zero limitations on their hand work like this un-compromised "traditional" design. Obviously guys doing more with power tools might want something different.Adam
Adam, and Richard,
It is a puzzlement to me. As I've said, my personal experiences in the shops I've worked in have all had against the wall benches. In addition, the Dominy shop that is at Winterthur now, has wall-mounted benches, and a local mid 19th century furniture shop I helped document before it was moved to a nearby museum had its benches wall mounted. In fact, those benches had no rear legs at all; they were built onto the walls of the shop. So, I just never considered another way to place a bench.
And yet, all the woodworkers shops illustrated in Diderot's Encyclopedia show free-standing benches. The joiners, cabinetmakers, and chairmakers shops have multiple benches aligned endwise to the wall. One bench in the chairmaker's shop is under a window (for carving?) , but two others are freestanding. This is in line with Richard's (European?) experience.
Whether it is a factor of the size of the shop-multiple benches requiring too much wall space, or geography- American workers deciding they want the wall-- for light from a nearby window, or storage for tools-- I dunno. I read somewhere that Duncan Phyfe's shop had something like a hundred benches in its heyday. It's hard to imagine all that wallspace for benches, with nothing else in the middle of what must have been a huge room or series of rooms.
The thing that comes to my mind is a local machine shop, which has something like a half dozen big metal lathes, all lined up, face to back down the center of the room. Now, one lathe, you'd put against the wall, when do you work behind a lathe? but if you have 6 or eight of them, it makes sense to stack them one in front of the other, in the middle of the room.
Ray
Adam, I have a question. It seems from the link to Schwarz's article that he considers the natural light from a window to be one of the most important features that makes a bench against a wall desirable. If you go back far enough in your definition of "traditional", near a window might have been a highly prized position for its light. It seems from your list of reasons for a bench against the wall that you may not consider window light so important. Is that true?
Edited 12/17/2007 6:13 pm by AlanWS
I'm not sure what Adam might say, but in the northern hemisphere I particularly value a north facing window. Failing that an east facing window is also good. Both provide the best natural light. In my case though I want the bench perpendicular to the line of the window, and set about four to six feet away from it.
This arrangement was how I first experienced workbenches in a working furniture workshop back in the early '70's. There were, if I remember rightly twelve, tall, north facing Georgian windows in a four story 1805 brick built building, and 12 benches all facing lengthways away from the windows. On the other side of the workshop with the same window configuration there were no benches, but there were small machines, assembly and layout areas.
At the far end of the workshop was a huge old fashioned open fireplace you could stand up in during the summer where we burnt scraps and threw the rags in after using them to slather on linseed oil to jobs. We never bothered with carefully hanging up oily rags to dry to prevent them catching fire. We just burnt the buggers. That way we knew what they were doing, ha, ha. I still quite often burn linseed oil soaked rags to this day.
I've worked with other window and bench arrangements since, but for me nothing's ever bettered that favoured north facing window set-up. Slainte.Richard Jones Furniture
Samson,
I have my bench against the wall for space considerations and rigidity (i.e. it is lag bolted to the wall studs). I also have a tooltray on the far side next to the wall. As most of my projects are fairly small it has not been an issue thus far.
I currently use my outfeed table as an assembly table but this will change with a new bench configuration I'm building, against another wall. My small 16' x 20' shop necessitates cluster placement of stationary tools in the center along with the DC.
Regards,
Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
I have a lot of one bench and a few of the other.
A table saw sits in the center of the shop towards the door. (easy loading). A fairly massive 4 x 8 hard maple bench sits in the center of the shop towards the back. Plenty of walk-around space for them both. A continuous bench and cabinet bank run the entire west side of the shop. And then there are two smaller benches - both 2' x 5' - one on the south, one on the east. All the benches, and the tablesaw, are the same height.
Hand tools, power tools or for a Friday after-work beverage... It doesn't matter. The majority of my time is spent at the large center bench.
Regards.
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