I have made some progress on the folding workbench. I am building the bench top from pieces, since I did not want to pay for a large thick chunk of good hardwood. Besides, I could use the practise in joining boards together. So I will have three layers of thinner boards pieced together. As I wrote, the top layer is from 4 pieces of maple joined with glue and dowels. It is 12 1/2″ wide:

The lower layers will not take the punishment that the top does, so I settled for Home Despot 1 x x pine. I joined 2 pieces with glue and dowels. Here they are resting on my rebuilt small workbench while the glue dries:

The anvil is helping to keep them flat. This project is making me appreciate something Roy Underhill and Norm Abram agree on: You can never have too many clamps.

The bottom layer is a piece of 5/8″ pine laminate I had lying around, i.e. Home Despot had already done the work of joining boards together. Roy Underhill’s original design calls for attaching a tool tray to the back of the workbench top after that is completed. This piece of pine laminate is 18″ inches wide, so I will just use the excess as the bottom of the tool tray. Here I have attached a pair of battens to hold the leg assemblies:

The general design comes from chapter 1 of The Woodwright’s Apprentice. I am altering the dimensions somewhat but the result should be quite recognizable. I looked for some details and pictures on-line but I have not found any yet.

I am feeling a little time pressure. It would be nice to take this to colgaffneyis show at Twig (near Duluth) the weekend after next. The exact design cannot be documented to our period, but recognizable workbenches go back to Roman times, and so far I have managed to avoid using the few power tools we own.