Making a workbench for a mitre saw

This winter has definitely been laying the groundwork for the heavy lifting we will need to do next year when we take on the new levels in the house. Tools have been at the heart of everything - whether they are garden tools or woodworking and DIY tools. W has spent hours poring over reviews on the interweb before deciding on each and every purchase. The tools aren't enough, though - you really need work benchs for tools to be able to work at their optimum level.

As a result, W has been busy making up a workbench to run the mitre (or miter, if you are american!) saw on. We've had it sat on an old tumble dryer as a stop gap, but it's not really safe and secure, so getting it onto a long term home was quite important.

For doing a lot of this sort of foundational work, W has been using a cheap and cheerful white deal plank that we buy in bulk from our favourite wood merchant. The first task was to work out the measurements - we used an online design as the base pattern , but needed to adjust the height to fit the specifics of the Makita mitre saw that we have, and wanted to make it 4 meters 40 cm  wide, and 60 cm  deep to accommodate European wood sizes. Once that was done, it was chopping time - cutting all the required lengths of planking to size. Then on to using a kreg jig to make the recessed screw holes to fit the 90 degree joins together.

Once everything was ready to assemble, time to get busy with the wood glue and screws. W has made a template to make sure that the corners are at 90 degrees true when being screwed together and you can see it in use here, with clamps holding it in place.

Once the main frame was assembled it's time to move onto the top surfaces. You can see that the sides are both higher than the central dipped area : the dip is where the mitre saw sits as it's got quite a high base. This means that you can support long planks on both sides of the workbench  on the flat surfaceand not have to juggle madly whilst cutting. Definitely a safety advantage! The main surface is a cheap composite board, that can be easily replaced if it gets damaged.

Last but not least, to make sure that we can move the workbench reasonably easily, W added roller wheels at the base. It looks gorgeous and hopefully it's going to be worth it's weight in gold soon!