I think I was still in school in woodwork classes last time I made anything out of wood. I have certainly never made anything as sizeable or complicated as a workbench.

So I didn’t know where to start and as such found a fantastic series of videos from Paul Sellers on YouTube which I’ve tried to work through. The videos are a great for walking beginners like me through the process step by step and I highly recommend you view them.

The series can be found here: How to Make a Workbench Introduction | Paul Sellers

So the following is not a how-to, the videos from Paul Sellers can explain things much better than I could. This is more my journal of the build process, along with a good few mistakes along the way and my attempts to resolve them. Hopefully it may help you avoid similar mishaps.

I started with some lengths of pine from B&Q, cut them to size, and proceeded to glue them up. I’ve never attempted such a large glue up previously but before applying the glue I put the lengths alongside each other and tightened the clamps a little to make sure they would sit together without any obvious gaps.

I then separated and applied glue to each length before tightening the clamps firmly.

I had obviously applied too much glue as a lot was squeezed out as the clamps bit. I wiped up as much as I could and propped it up on a couple of wooded offcuts to let it dry. Which was a mistake…..

After letting the glue dry for 24 hours I removed the clamps. It didn’t fall apart which was a good start, however I then realised my mistake. I had left the work surface to dry sat on a couple of pieces of wood. Of course, as I had used too much glue, it had seeped out and glued the work surface to the supports which hadn’t been the intention.

I should probably have put a few sheets of newspaper or similar in-between to prevent this from happening. The paper would have glued itself to the work surface of course, but it would have sanded off easily enough.

Instead, it looked like I had made a rather rudimentary headboard and the extra wood did not want to come off. I ended up using a blunt/cheap chisel in the end to sever the glue and remove unwanted pieces.

I also found I had large droplets of glue on the underside where it had set as it seeped out. I used the chisel again and scraped off the worst – I was planning on this being the underside anyhow so it didn’t matter too much.

So with the glue up complete, I took my plane which I had recently restored and put it to use on it’s first project to flatten up the surface. Not bad for a first attempt.