The last part in the coffee table project, was to add a corner detail to emphasize – even farther – the presence of the slanted chamfer. I decided to create an indented square at each corner which will expose the chamfer's angle and thus will make it more conspicuous.

I used a chisel and made the indentation. I then painted the square black-gray (the same color as the table base. One might mistake the black-gray square as the top of the leg, but of course this is just an illusion.

If I were to built the bench again, I would have not added a decorated finials to the wooden nuts that anchors the lag screws. The finials allowed me to easily rotate the nuts right or left, and in and out in order to align them with the lag screws, but they are prone to breakage and might be just that obstacle you bang your knee or toe into. In hindsight the nut should have had a protrusion to help me align it to the lag screw, but definitely less conspicuous than the one I made. The best way to transform a wooden dowel into a leg screw nut is by pre-tapping the dowel hole with a makeshift lag bolt tap.  Using a rectangle file I formed a tapered groove in the end of a lag bolt– starting at the tip and going back to about 3/4” long.  The teeth formed on the sides of the groove thread the hole, so once you screw in the actual connecting lag-bolts, they easily anchor themselves in the wooden nuts.

I equipped my new American workbench with a Record Marple Hold Down clamp (Model #145), a quick release bench-vise, three rows of 3/4" diameter holes to accommodate the Veritas system of bench dogs. The street-found workbench served me well. For eight years it stood in my living room enabling me to do small scale projects in the comfort of my home. Because I had to relocate and knew that a close friend would probably make best use of the bench, I decided to give it to Jake, knowing he could put it to good use in his and his girlfriend's cabin in New Hampshire. Last weekend I took the bus and visited my friends in Tamworth N.H. Their cabin is nice and cozy, built twenty years ago by Karl, Caitlin's father; no running water, no electricity, but with a working stove and lots of character.

The first real woodworking project I built in the USA was a pine workbench. The story of this piece began with a discarded metal cabinet I found on Irving street in Cambridge MA. I mention Irving Street because a few weeks after I found the metal cabinet I found a set of pine bunk beds waiting patiently to be picked up by the trash truck on the same street. The bunk beds provided the wood for my new workbench. A few years later I discovered another “gem” on Irving Street, which I used for the construction of a High Boy I named Cantabrigian Highboy, but more about that later. Irving Street is also important because its the street that Julia Child used to live on.  A few years before she passed away her historic kitchen was taken apart, shipped to Washington and reassembled to proudly reside in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum. So you see for some mysterious reason Irving St. is an important location in the tales of my own pieces and of the culinary legacy of the nation.

I started my new workbench by disassembling the old bunk bed parts. After that I joined planed and re-dimensioned the old-new lumber into vertical and horizontal members. For added strength I used lap joints for all the joints.

The new wooden frame was designed to encapsulate the metal cabinet. The workbench upright parts (the legs) are connected to the rails with lag screws anchored into 1” diameter wooden nuts. The bench was designed so it could be easily disassembled. It’s top incorporated lumber from the bunk beds as well. After completing the workbench, I decided the drawer pulls on the metal cabinet were just too small to be used, so I built new pulls from wood with a shape that compliments the overall look of my new American furniture.

Re-sawing these behemoths open revealed terrific looking lumber inside.