So I pretty much spent every spare weekend in September and October riding bikes with my son for Bicycle merit badge. On the 50 milers, I was pretty sure some of them were about to earn Lifesaving merit badge as well, but I somehow managed to go from logging no bike miles to logging 300 miles in the span of two months, and then spent the next two months allowing my buttocks to recover. After the long pause, I started chipping away at the smaller details that could be done in an hour here and 20 minutes there.

I debated a lot about the exposed ends of the workbench. They weren't exactly even or pretty, but they didn't bug me much, either. I decided to dress them up with some sort of apron or skirt. I had grand visions of doing the aprons as half-blind dovetails, but in the interest of time and ease, I decided to go with dowels. Being a glue laminate top, I doubt it is going to expand or shrink very much, but I still needed the ability to split the bench for transport and allow for some degree of expansion, so dowels it was. The hard decisions out of the way, there was nothing left to it, but to do it.

First, gluing the face rails to the long ends of the slab. To leverage the relatively limited number of clamps I had that would span the full width of the slab, I used cauls, which are pieces of wood with a mild curve built into one side. As you clamp the ends of the cauls, pulling the curved ends flat causes the raised part in the center to apply more pressure to the wood between the clamps:



I applied a lot of glue, and got plenty of squeeze-out, and did a half-arsed job wiping it off before it set. Consequently, I had to do a fair amount of work with a sanding block and flush-plane to clean it off, and then finish with a 150grit disk on my circular sander. Could have saved myself a half hour of work with five minutes of patience and clean-up after I got it in the clamps, but such is life.



Before I moved on to the ends of the apron, figured now would be a good time to mill out some space for the t-track and bench mounts.


Milled the track with my Festool router on a rail clamped to either end of the bench. Squared off the channel with a chisel. Fit like a glove.



Then it came time to mount the long track, and my inherent laziness bit me in the ass again. I had a long rail which I could have busted out and clamped to either end of the bench. But I felt like that was too much work, and the rails have some high-friction material on the bottom to keep them from sliding around. Figured I'd be fine without clamps if I was just careful. I was wrong.


So I took a break to get the correct rail I should have used the first time, clamp it in place, and route the front facing edge of the channel straight. Then I cut a blank off a spare piece of 2x4 and glued it in place. Flushed it out, and routed the correct channel, this time with both ends of the long rail clamped.