Comments on Workbench books *LINK*
Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA
>I recently got Lon Schleining's new book, "The Workbench," from the local library. I was interested to see if Taunton Press had improved on Scott Landis' "The Workbench Book," and have concluded after comparing the two that, no, they haven't.
Unlike the recent, "The Workshop," which has very different intentions from the mid-1980's "The Workshop Book," the new book and its predecessor focus on the same subject: the design, creation, and fittings for a woodworking workbench. The new one does cover some useful territory, including demonstrations of how to build several common bench styles, and some useful fittings I'd never seen before. However, I had several problems with it:
1. It's less detailed than Landis' book, but seems to use more words in the process. Scott Landis goes into some detail about benches - two examples are a) leg vise design, including several methods of handling the necessary fulcrum at the bottom and the intriguing angled-leg vise, and b) bench dogs including edge dogs and homegrown bench dogs. Schleining just doesn't have the detail. He spends four pages on different materials from which bench dogs can be made, with some excursions into the tradeoffs between square and round dogs, but tells you about as much in those four pages as Landis seems to in two.
2. The benches shown in Schleining's book are not particularly creative. Landis had examples of some bizarre benches that, nevertheless, got me thinking about bench design. Schleining's examples are kind of ho-hum.
3. It has peculiar omissions. The one that struck me most vividly is on page 162, where a router jig is shown in use cutting the notches on square dog holes during the building of a bench. The jig seems to consist of a piece of plywood with stops nailed on, but the sum total of the explanation is as follows: "This little jig saves a lot of time cutting all the notches for the dog heads. The router is fitted with a 1/4-in. straight bit set as deep as the slot." Yes, and how does it do it again?
4. Schleining's word use, or perhaps the copy editor's word use, was irritating to this old curmudgeon. He constantly describes a vise's tendency to twist when the stock is clamped off-center as "wracking." I don't think he's referring to general destruction and ruin or the wreckage of a ship, the first two definitions I find on dictionary.com. I think he meant "racking." The capper, though, is on page 137, where he says, referring to a bench design, "The base can be completely dissembled for moving or storage." I do a certain amount of dissembling when it comes to my shop, but it usually occurs during conversations with LOML, when the question arises of what I paid for the latest piece of rust that followed me home.
Adam Cherubini has expressed, oh maybe once or twice, his frustration with Landis' book, and I understand his reasoning; the book is better at talking about benches than it is about how this ultimate shop tool works. But, for someone starting out in hand tool woodworking, even understanding how the bench parts work is a good start, so I think this kind of book has its place.
Schleining's book is a worthwhile book to get from your local library - again, it had some useful information - but if I were choosing one book to serve as my reference when thinking about what kind of bench I should have in my shop, I'd choose Landis' book.
Barb Siddiqui's review of Lon Schleining's book
