Many people have asked us what can they expect from our videos? Will they be on a separate website, on a DVD and do they have to pay for them? Well to be honest these are questions that we have been asking ourselves over and over trying to find the right way to present all the exciting things that we have to share.

Our plan at present is to bring you two forms of content. The first to become available is what we consider to be the ‘TV’ type stuff. Frequent videos that everyone will be able to watch entirely for free within this blog. Although free these will be made to the highest quality we can muster up between the two of us and will include tips, techniques and small projects. They will be short and digestible, perfect if you’re just grabbing lunch in the office or winding down on an evening.

Less frequently we will be creating longer, project videos that very thoroughly take you step by step through the processes. These will come with a price tag and will be available to stream and download for watching whenever, wherever and as many times as you like.

From the very beginning of this blog its been important for us to create a personal output for our ideas and we want the free videos to very much be an extension of this. Of course making videos is not a quick or easy process and so at some point we will need some means to earn and fund them. We envisage that for this kind of content to become a possibility long term we will be needing to look towards sponsorship. For this to become a reality we will need all the help we can get from yourselves in spreading the word – it’s going to be vital to create a keen and sizable audience.

If you’re as excited as we are about the prospect of the videos then please don’t keep quiet about it; tell your friends and anyone whom you think will also be interested. And as Helen said yesterday, be sure to stay notifed by subscribing to our blog.

First full video will be posted next week!

The exciting news is that we now have a fair bit of footage to share and we’d like to bring you the first look at ‘The English Woodworker Online Videos’ here next week. There’s a full mix of content that we have planned and we’re going to pick out one from the ‘Tips & Techniques’ hat in a hope that this might entice more people to come along ready to enjoy the project builds that will follow.

Here you can see our ‘film set’ as it started to come together (it was actually my office but I’ve been pushed out to make way for the videos). A few mismatched floor boards and some old unwanted cladding were used to transform the room; it wasn’t elegant but in the spirit of make do and mend it was just the right touch to create a setting for the ensemble of hand tools which now hang from every crevice.
This isn’t a very big space but we had various reasons to set up here as it was easy to manage the sound and lighting. We also loved the idea of it being very down to earth (this room is much smaller than a single garage) but were able to show how it is ample space for hand tool woodworking, and if we didn’t have the filming equipment to worry about there’s also room for a small band saw and planer / thicknesser.

The videos will be varied so we’ll also be nipping to our main workshop from time to time to show how we might speed things up or take a different approach over at some of the machines. We hope that the consistent theme throughout all of the videos will be that ‘down to earth’ feel; this is about doing woodworking for the enjoyment and for making beautiful and practical creations that you can be proud of.

If you’re eager to see what we have to offer then please dont forget to subscribe here or to our RSS feed to stay notified.

After what turned in to an extensive session of building the Little John workbenches we received some lovely feedback, appreciation and photos from our customers as they were being put to work by their new owners. The comments below were sent through to me earlier this week.

Hello Helen,

My ‘Little John’ bench arrived today, it was well wrapped and protected for transit. Once I’d got the bubble-wrap, plywood and polythene off and having checked out the bench thoroughly, I can only say that I am absolutely delighted with it. I am amazed how stable and solid it is, everything about the bench is first class.

I’ve had the timber to build my perfect bench in stock for longer than I care to remember, I realised recently that I was never going to get round to building it, hence my decision to order one from you. Clearly it was a good decision and I have now got my perfect bench!

Having recently agonised on how to sensibly price a commission such that the price was fair to both parties, I have to say that I think the bench is under-priced, yet I appreciate the need to attract customers with a keen price!

Please pass on my thanks and appreciation to Richard and anyone else involved in its making.

Thanks and regards,

John S

We did announce recently that the price of the Little John is set to rise this will be happening this Friday morning – that still gives today and tomorrow to place your small deposit to keep to a ‘bargain’ price. Of course it sound cheesy but it’s always been the positive feedback that’s the golden coins to us – hearing back from happy customers really is priceless!

It doesn’t matter how many benches like these I build I still had to work myself up to it yet once I got stuck it I found it all very enjoyable. The cherry was such a pleasure to work and once it all started coming together I began getting a buzz of excitement to finally see the finished result.

Being a bit different we decided to keep a record of this build and turn it in to an article for Furniture and Cabinent Making Magazine. This Thursday 16th the magazine will be out on the shelves so you can take a look at the processes and workbench in more detail.

Since the bench was somewhat unique and I don’t expect anyone to set out to copy it detail for detail I wanted to use the article to provide some more general pointers when it comes to building a solid workbench. There’s some info in there about tackling a big thick top glue up along with the approach I took to the joinery.

If you’re toying with building a workbench or just have a healthy interest in them then I certainly hope that you’ll find it a good read.

Despite the UK’s move to the metric system many moons ago it seems that there are great numbers still clinging on to their feet and inches so there has to be something that gives it an edge. Richard has often told me that it’s the centimetre that’s the problem and he’s not the only person I know who finds it a bit puzzling looking at cm’s when taking large measurements. After several years of becoming more familiar with imperial I think I’ve sussed why the cm is deemed by some as the measurement from Hell! It’s about the ratio between the various units in the system.

A centimetre of course is ten times larger than a millimetre and a metre is one hundred times larger than a centimetre. That’s a perfect relationship for simple mathematics but it isn’t very well balanced when visualising it on a tape measure. A centimetre divides up nicely in to small and accurate millimetres but compare a centimetre to a metre and it’s so small it gets lost. To aid this problem we tend to find that tape measures use a visual queue (a bold line or red number) at every ten centimetre interval and some goes as far as to miss any extra emphasis when we come to a metre instead continuing by calling them 100, 200, etc.
Dividing a metre in to ten like this is much more helpful when measuring long distances than seeing hundreds and hundreds of centimetres but this unit doesn’t really exist with its own name. The red ’20′ on the metric side of the tape in the photo is the location of 120cm but looking at it in isolation this isn’t immediately clear and to add to the confusion the same numbers ’1- 9′ run continuously along the tape.

By contrast imperial units come without the ease of having to only understand your ten times table. A foot is made up of 12 inches and an inch becomes progressively smaller in divisions of 8, 16, 32 & even 64 should you need to go that small. This makes life difficult at the drawing board but just look at the photo to see how much clearer it makes things in the real world of full scale measurements. Long distances can be read simply with the bold and continuous markings of both inch and feet and if accuracy is required every 1/16″ is also noted. Finding 49″ inches or 4′ 1″ on that tape certainly jumps out much clearer and quicker than searching for 1.24m,  124cm or 1240mm.

The relationship between an inch and foot makes heaps more sense than that of a centimetre and metre and yet I would still never give up my metric system when making scale drawings. Perhaps then we will always continue to keep both versions alive as each definitely brings its own strengths for particular applications. It’s a prime example of when one thing is more suited to theory and another to practise. So…what do you use, and why?

Building a workbench can be a special and sometimes daunting project and the journey can involve a lot of planning and forethought. It’s not uncommon for us to exchange several emails with a customer regarding their workbench design, trying to help out and clear up some of the queries along the way. So when a photo comes through with the final result it’s a real treat. The quality and attention to detail never fails to impress us but the part we really enjoy is seeing how the benches always have their own personality despite often starting out with a similar design and the same hardware.

Corrie - USA

If you are browsing our vices in the online shop then you may notice that our Pinless leg vice is temporarily unavailable. We are very low on the shaft systems so are currently prioritising what we have left for use in our own workbench builds. We’re waiting on new stock so if you are interested then please get in touch.

A Little John at it's new home in France

Copyright Ben Plewes

Building workbenches does seem to require a lot of holes; there’s those for the bench dogs, the vice jaws and all of the drawboring for the joinery . This poor drill has never been looked after or cared for and yet it gets a serious workout every week. It’s been so reliable I did’t even notice that I’d started using it so much. I should think that much of what I do at it could just as quickly be done with a hand held drill so I suppose I’m using just because it’s there. Just like a tin of shortbread, you could have a couple of pieces but you don’t, you eat the lot because you know they’re there (or is that just me?). I think my drill has earnt a clean up and maybe a better repair to that handle.

Still I’ll not forget the headaches it gave me when it was new. The drill came fitted with a keyless chuck and the trouble with a chuck that has no key is sometimes it desides to stay locked. Maybe this was an isolated problem with mine due to excessive use or something but I remember days that started out so productively being held up by the dreaded chuck lock. All sorts of creative ways were attempted to get drill bits out with the most effective being to throw the whole chuck in to the freezer. This happened just a few times before I realised a good old keyed chuck was more my thing.

Most of the time I don’t really consider our business to be all that businessy, and what I mean is if you wrote it all out as a proper plan on paper you’d probably learn to stop before you started. By my nature I like to build things as well as possible but when you put this it to a business that builds workbenches; a utility item it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. And when that utility item requires a lot of materials – we’re talking heaps of wood, then working out the right price to sell at is particularly difficult. Building to a very high quality will never work out cheap and people can be staggered at the cost of some of our benches but what surprises me the most is how often I get told they are under priced – and that’s from our own customers! The reason they can be considered this way is because fellow woodworkers can appreciate the amount of material costs that go in to them and also see that building something of this scale to a high quality is going to take a fair amount of time. Compared to building a dining table building a workbench takes more time, more wood and yet if built well the handmade dining table could command a higher price because it will take centre stage within the home and not be hidden out in the garage or workshop.

So perhaps then that is the pitfall of building workbenches, they’re utility. But then that could be said of almost any tool and we all like dependable, quality tools. Where workbenches do differ is their size; they’re just so big and I feel this is where the more specific pitfalls come from. Large items need a large space to be built in, large equipment to build them and a lot of material costs up front. All of this means it’s certainly not the cheapest business to start up and you can’t avoid the need to build and test various prototypes of everything. Once up and running you need to keep maintaining all of that space, equipment and stocks of materials so it’s a continual process which to some part we’ve controlled by really minimising the equipment used. Our structure isn’t typical of any woodworking firm today as it depends so heavily on me becoming efficient in my approach to building. In terms of machines I can get by with nothing more than a planer, a small bandsaw, our Wadkin cross cut and a pillar drill. Besides the Wadkin the other items are not particularly large and certainly not fancy. The benefit is keeping tooling and maintenance costs to a minimum which could otherwise be a huge expense. We’d had an enquiry earlier this year from a school that required several workbenches. They were just working out all of their costings at the time and asked how we go about flattening the tops as they would do this in the future by putting them through their enormous belt sander. When we told them the tops were flattened by hand they were bemused and asked “doesn’t this make them very expensive due to the time?” It doesn’t make them expensive or slow as I will flatten within 15 minutes by taking my number 8 plane over to the bench. If I had a belt sander not only would there be all of the setting up time, costs and space required but I would need to have someone help me take the top to the tool rather than the other way around. Besides this a planed finish is much nicer, perfectly flat and with just the right level of friction left due to the plane strokes on the surface.

With the pitfalls has to come some benefits and I find the biggest one to be our customers. After building much furniture for commissions earlier on I am really grateful to be able to sell to woodworkers. People who understand the product or are incredibly excited to learn about it and I don’t receive strange requests like I did with furniture where people can think it’s easy to just add a bit on here, there and everywhere.

There’s endless amounts that could be said but it’s difficult to know how much would ever be relevant to someone else as they may take a different approach entirely. Something I can be sure of is that success isn’t always measured in money. And remember… with any business, one thousand steps starts with one!

This workbench is not being sold directly by ourselves but as far as we’re aware is the first Maguire Workbench to be brought to the second hand market by one of our customers – quite a strange prospect really but very good to know that this workbench has survived well through one ownership and is ready for its next.  This is one of our earlier benches which as you can see is based on the Roubo design and shares many similarities with our current Workhorse model.

The bench is shown here in our own original photos along with a shot of Richard stood by it at the very first European Woodworking show.  I’m told that the condition today is still very close to new with nothing more than a couple of small scratches.
The construction is solid ash and the lovely wooden screw in the leg vice travelled all the way from America from Big Wood Vise as it was installed before we’d started out on our journey to make our own vices. Unlike our Workhorse model this bench came with an absence of tail vice and was the first time that we introduced the ‘flip stop’ now present down the centre of all our bench tops. Though simple the flip stop can be used to support your work quickly whilst planing the face as shown in the photo and if you combine it with bench stop as shown here or a holdfast or two then there’s very little you can’t do that a tail vice can.

The workbench has been well cared for but now unfortunately has to be rehomed due to a move of house. The sale will not be connected to ourselves but we are lending a helping hand by informing people here so if you are interested please email myself (not phone) and I can provide you with the relevant information helen@rm-workbenches.co.uk
Collection will have to be arranged by the purchaser from the benches location at postcode NR12.