Building my new benches

By now it must be obvious that I decided to sort out the garage and make it more of a workshop. My old bench that I built many years ago had to be easy to set up and take down because I worked outside when the weather permitted. Now I had the garage space in which to work and it was just time to build a new bench.

The outside wall of the garage has pillars 1600mm apart, so I decided to build one new bench to fit between two pillars and then another bench the size of the MFT top to fit in the gap the other side of the pillar. I then decided I'd build my router table into the bench using the cabinet I'd built previously.

Here's a view along the length of the benches.

Overall I now have around 3M of bench space, 720mm deep.

Each bench has a simple frame made from stud timber available at my local DIY store (B&Q as it happens) and the bench top is 18mm MDF to match the MFT top. Once built they are finished with wax, although the router section is finished with 3 coats of a water-based varnish (purely because I wanted to try a different finish on the MDF when I made it).

The bench frame was constructed as two rectangles and the legs were fastened on the inside squaring it up as I went. A bottom shelf adds to the rigidity of the bench and it's certainly rigid and strong.

You can see how simple the frame is here. The bottom shelves were made from whatever I had left-over. This one is some OSB, the other bench has some 18mm ply I picked out of the off cut box at B&Q. I'm very grateful to whoever it was that didn't want the off-cuts, I got almost a full sheet of good sized pieces!

The work bench has a small vice attached, and I am planning to build a better woodworking vice for it. I also drilled some 20mm holes in the top so that I could use the bench dogs and clamps with it as well as the MFT style bench.



The MFT has a piece of aluminium extrusion on the front edge set just below the height of the top. I could have used T-track, but I bought a piece of extrusion to make a fence and decided to buy a second piece for the front edge. T-track would have been more flexible because it would take the track clamps. The extrusion is primarily intended for building CNC machines, but it makes a great fence.

 Here's the MFT with the fence. You can also see the bench dogs in their holder on the wall behind and attached to the fence is the flag stop.

So far it's all proved very useful. The built-in router table works okay. It has two slots for its fence. The fence has a couple of carriage bolts that drop through holes in the top and run in a couple of grooves.

So, how much did it cost? The timber was probably around £40 for the studs and a sheet of OSB, oh and there was the MDF for the router table and workbench.

The MFT top was £36 from CNCDesign and the extrusion was £34 from Ooznest for both pieces. There bench dogs came from Benchdogs as did the flag stop and the fence dogs. They came to around £68 in total.

The. various jigs and things I've made to go with the MFT are all made from scrap. The only thing I had to buy were some nuts and bolts to use with the track. A fully kitted Festool MFT3 comes in at around £600 new, £300-400 without the fence and guide rail extras.