Blood, Sweat, and Sawdust

Beams for the Roubo Bench Top

I finished the last section of my bench top lamination and  learned some valuable lessons along the way. Overall, things went well, but there are a few things I would do differently in the future. The biggest challenge was the sheer number of boards for the top and their cumbersome length.

Here are the tips I found most useful:

• Rehearse your glue up before applying any glue – do this for each section
• Skip planing is more than fine for this type of glue-up, but beware of hard-to-see snipe
• Before milling, cleanup your shop. There’s nothing worse than tripping over things will ripping 8 ft long boards in a small shop.
• A small paint roller speeds up glue application
• Use glue with a long open time. Titebond Extend will give you plenty of time to get your boards coated and aligned
• Take your time. I ended up with a couple of sections that have a board slightly misaligned. Even an error of 1/16th will add a lot of work to the final milling
• Don’t skimp on edge jointing, before ripping your boards to width. This will help ease alignment during your glue-up.
• Don’t skimp on the glue.
• While we’re at it, don’t skimp on the clamps.  Use as many as you have.
• If using a resinous wood, wipe the surfaces down with a fast drying solvent before applying glue.  This will allow the glue to penetrate deeper.
• Allow the squeeze out to become leathery and scrape as much off as possible before it fully hardens

If anyone else out there has similar experience, what tips did you find useful?

You can find links to my other Roubo posts here:  Project Index