Seeing as I am an overambitious, yet obessively compulsive, woodworker I recently found myself in an uphill battle with a massive slab of oak. The bench in the shop at work has been used and abused for as long as I have been alive. Word on the street is that it hasn't even been flattened since it was first built...so I took the liberty of flattening it myself.
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| 20+ years of grime, sweat, and I am pretty sure some blood. |
I started going transversely with the grain with a flat iron and things were going well, that was until I reached the far left hand side of the bench, which has been used as the sharpening station for quite a while. All that oil, metal particles, sandpaper grit, rust, and god knows what else really sunk into the wood because after five strokes my iron was dull as a doorknob.
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| Windows open with a nice cooling breeze, I can think of a lot worse things to be doing. |
Switching to a heavily chambered iron sped things up considerably, and even when the iron dulled, the heavy chamber helped to muscle through with the initial planing. After one pass I switched to 45 degrees with the grain, pushing the plane body at a skewed angle helped slice through some of the rough grain and knots.
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| Getting a bit closer, you can see the scalloped track marks from the last flattening. |
I finished up going with the grain (as best I could) and planing the front of the bench to be square with the top. Overall it was an exhausting project...most people aren't stupid enough to flatten a knotty, old, 16 FOOT!!! workbench their first time around the block, but I am just the right kind of stupid.
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| There is still plenty of character in this bench, but now you can use it reliably to try boards! |
So if you are ever looking for a new workout routine, I would recommend going into the massive workbench flattening business.
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| My workhorse plane, I might follow up with a longer jointer in the future, but I am not sure it is necessary. |
PS. I am just being melodramatic...it really only took about two hours and one sweaty t-shirt, and that included re-honing my iron twice.
