French bench and general musings
Michael Recchione
>It's funny that if you hang around these forums long enough, you see "truths" go into and out of fashion, pretty much like bell-bottoms and disco music.
One example is what constitutes common knowledge regarding the "ultimate smoothing plane". For a while the revealed and accepted Truth was that everyone serious about woodworking needed at least one infill. Now it seems that the fashion is bevel-up iron planes. I still have neither the infill nor the bevel-up plane, and somehow, miraculously, my wood gets smoothed. Must be elves sneaking into the shop in the middle of the night.
Another example is what constitutes the ultimate workbench. Here the fashion seems to have changed even more quickly than it has for smoothing planes. I've seen fevers for German cabinetmaker's benches, Shaker benches... for a while every new bench had sled feet and a LV twin screw vise on the end and a double row of round dog-holes up the length of the bench. We went from a plane shelf under the bench to full-blown tool cabinets to the current quasi-religious conviction that you shouldn't store anything under the bench. (Right, like I can afford to waste that much space in my little shop...) Skirts got long for a while and the Nicholson bench enjoyed a very short vogue, and then hot-pants came in so now it's the Roubo bench.
I'm likely to build a replacement for my main bench pretty soon, since the top of the one I built originally is self-destructing at one end, and won't take any more flattening without becoming translucent. I've considered a bunch of different options and they all have good points and bad points. The minimalism and simplicity of the Roubo bench is appealing, as is its mass. However, it may not be the universal solution that it's currently touted to be.
It appears to offer a lot of flexibility, but it also appears to be optimized to make it easy to do the same thing many times in a row - almost like a machine. You set it up with your holdfasts and battens and hooks and stops and straight two by fours between the pegs, and then you're set to move lots of pieces of wood into and out of that setup very quickly.
But the setup probably takes longer than it would to do the same thing on, say, a German-style cabinetmaker's bench where the vises and board-jack and dogs are right there in the same place all the time. So if I'm working a bunch of different small, one-of-a-kind pieces, one after the other, the German-style bench probably beats the French. And if the pieces are shaped oddly, a patternmaker's bench beats both of them. And if I need to work up close to my eyes and carve panels, a carving bench beats all the others. And, ..., and, ...
If you tend to make the same kind of thing all the time, there may be an ultimate bench and a best way to do it. If you're like me, your woodworking interests change over the years and you want your bench to adapt to your changing needs. It may be that the kinds of things Wearing talks about, even though they're very non-traditional in ways, actually give you a bench that's an optimal compromise for the home hobby shop.
If I build my new bench within the next year, it might be Rouboesque. But that's only because I've learned that (a) you get used to just about anything, (b) if you have anything long enough, there are going to be things about it that annoy you, and (c) there are many ways to skin a cat. The Roubo bench looks very cool and very "neanderthal" and is simple to make - no fussing with getting a tail vise to work right, simple leg vise, massive enough to stand up to just about anything - all of which which argue for it. But I've had way too much fun with my old bench (which wasn't Rouboesque) to believe that it will make much difference to my woodworking.
The French made nice stuff out of wood. So did the Germans and the English and the Italians and the Japanese and the Chinese... Their benches were all different from one another, and they all worked. To sort of come back to the original question, which was about edge jointing, all of these traditions dealt with it and dealt with it well on their benches. You probably can't go too wrong no matter what you do. And, whatever you do, you'll find things wrong with it eventually, but you'll probably get used to it so you don't even think about it anymore. And, if it's really a pain, you can always make something else.
http://members.shaw.ca/glia/Bench/2%20vises.jpg
Here's a picture of a Frank Klausz style bench slave.
Here's someone else's interpretation.