Tom set out to build the bench he’d always wanted. Not the bench he could afford right now, not the bench he could finish in a weekend – the bench. A full Roubo, in white oak, with hand-cut joinery throughout, a leg vise with a wooden screw he turned himself on his lathe, and a sliding deadman he’d read about in Christopher Schwarz’s book three times before he felt ready to build it. He started in February 2022. He finished in August 2023.
“I built it at the pace the wood demanded,” he explains. The oak came from a tree a neighbor had cut down. It sat in his garage for six months drying before he touched it. Then there were the mortises – 16 of them, all chopped by hand. Then the leg vise screw, turned from a 4-inch oak blank over four evenings. Then the top glue-up, which required every clamp he owned plus six he borrowed, and a flattening session with a scrub plane and a jointer plane that he says was the most satisfying afternoon of his woodworking life.
The bench is not perfect. The top has a slight wind in one corner that he says he’ll flatten out “someday.” One leg is 1/16 of an inch shorter than the others – shimmed with a playing card. But the joints are tight, the vise is smooth, and the bench is the kind of solid that makes you feel competent just by walking past it.
“It slowed down my learning of every other skill,” he admits. “But it’s the foundation everything else is built on. I don’t regret a single hour.” Eighteen months of evenings and weekends. A bench he’ll probably use for the rest of his life. That math works.