About a year after I built The $175 Workbench, I built The Power Tool Workbench for the August 2002 issue of Popular Woodworking magazine. The issue featuring The $175 Workbench had done particularly well on the newsstands (the bench had been on the cover), and so my fellow editors were willing to let me stick my neck out again.
Listen beautiful relax classics on our Youtube channel.
This bench’s structure is similar to The $175 Workbench, but it has a bank of drawers below (not a fan of that) and it is sized to fit behind a table saw. Also, it features a Veritas Twin-screw Vise on one end.
All of my benches have had a hard life, but this one especially. I gave it to my father. He had it in his garage in Charleston, S.C., where it weathered a couple hurricanes and storm surges. After the last storm surge, my dad found it floating in about 6’ of water.
It survived quite well. The only repair I had to make was to lubricate the drawer slides to get them unstuck from rust.
The benchtop is a little small for handwork, but I’m not going to ever let it go. After my father died in 2018, it was one of the few things I took with me from his house.
That doesn’t mean it’s a perfect bench – far from it. The video explains it.
Items shown or mentioned in the video.
— Christopher Schwarz
Source: lostartpress.com