I had to put a pause on the workbench and vise for a little while to clean up and rearrange the shop (and the shed, and the laundry room).  This gave me some more elbow room in the shop. You have to do some reorganizing and purging once in a while... :)

Well now, making the top for the Shaker workbench is turning out to be a whole 'nother project on its own!

Cutting white ash boards, 18 in all, to rough size and milling to final thickness/width...

Making some heavy duty clamping cauls out of SuperStrut, and some clamping stands out of plywood...

Laminating 3 "sub-slabs" of 6 boards each: glue, cauls, clamps...

Running the 3 sub-slabs through the jointer and planer to get them to almost final thickness...

Doing another glue-caul-clamp process, this time to join the 3 sub-slabs into one monster top piece. The cauls worked wonderfully, necessitating only a little glue scraping at the seams, and the top was flat and smooth. MANY thanks go to my lovely and gracious Glue-Up Helper Squad! :)

To be continued, after we recuperate and eat some more Wheaties... :)  :)

Assembling all the rest of the base pieces together, and setting it in the mobile base:

Thanks to Deb and Hannah for the continued help!

Next big milestone: building and installing the top!

Assembling the back with stretchers, mullion rails, and painted panels:

Putting together the two side/end assemblies:

Some last things to do before assembly of the base...

Cut the 3/8" drawbore pegs from cherry dowel stock; use a pencil sharpener to chamfer the ends (to make it easier for the pegs to wiggle through the offset holes)...

Final prep on the panels - sanding the outside faces, using a block plane to make some light chamfers on the edges:

Applying 3 coats of milk paint on the outside faces of the panels. Apparently this is something that Shaker craftsmen would do on the secondary woods of their benches:

Continuing on the base for the Shaker workbench...

Stopped-  and through-groove joinery on the legs, stretchers, mullions:

Making the 15 soft maple panels (with tongue and groove joinery) that will wrap around the sides and back of the base:

Using the router table to cut decorative beads on the edges of the panels:

Doing some dry test assembly and making some fine adjustments to make sure the pieces will easily fit together when we do the actual glue-up:

Next up:

Surface prep, milk-painting the panels, and the big base assembly!

With the leg mortises done, it was time to move onto making the tenons on the stretcher beams, end stretchers, and back mullions.

Test cuts, test fits, and cutting shoulders on the table saw...

Cutting the tenon cheeks for the large stretchers on the bandsaw...

Finessing the shape and size of the tenons using a chisel, block plane, and sandpaper...

Doing a dry test assembly...

That's looking like a pretty beefy base frame!

The Shaker workbench will have a pretty beefy frame, and the main joinery between the legs and rails will be mortise and tenon. Here we are getting the leg mortises cut...

First - mark the layout lines, and hog out the mortises using the Festool XL:

Then finesse the mortise walls with chisels to clean up the ridges:

Drill out the peg holes that will be used for the drawbores on the tenons that fit into the mortises...

So, this spring I have a handful of house/yard projects to get worked in between stints on the new workbench build.

Last summer late, some of the local deer re-discovered our gardens, and in one night almost completely wiped out everything that had been grown, wasting a whole season's worth of labor by Hannah. So this year, we decided to install an electric fence around both gardens to deter them from coming back.

Making up the insulator mounts and installing them on the fences, installing the polywire...

Installing the ground rod and solar fence charger...

Running underground cable from the solar charger to the fence wires...

Ready for action...