My workbench is ugly. It’s REALLY ugly. If ugly were bricks, my bench could build the Great Wall of China.

The beast was born one Valentine’s Day night when my wife was working evenings. I was the only guy at Home Depot that night (everyone else had the sense to take their sweeties out for a nice dinner). I cobbled a puny little bench together with some Simpson Strong-Tie connectors, 2×4’s, a half-sheet of ¾” plywood and a fistful of screws. And, it was good.

Later, when I discovered that my 2 foot by 4 foot bench top wasn’t going to be large enough to work for me, I scrounged through my neighbor’s garbage after he did some renovation work and found his old wooden entry door. SUPER ugly 1970’s carvings and molding on the outside a dark, chocolate brown paint on the smooth inside panel. I carted that heavy sucker home, removed the small plywood top and screwed the big 36″ x 80″ door in its place.

Yes, it has the hinge mortises. And the bore holes for the deadbolt, door knob and security peep-hole. I consider that as part of my shop security plan.

Over the years, I have glued up on it, painted on it and tested the sharpness of plane irons on its corners. I’ve pounded on it, screwed jigs to it and (accidentally) cut into it with a circular saw. This thing is a beast! The creature from a nasty corner of the nasty garage.

But, it has a beauty all its own, too. That ugly bench of mine is the perfect size for my shop. I have built countless projects on it – from the obscenely large to the dainty and delicate. I can lay a straight edge on the door and verify that yes, it is dead flat – once I scrape the beads of dried glue off of it. I can clamp projects down to the overhanging edges and know that they won’t move when I chisel, cut or plane. It’s the same height as my table saw, and functions as an outfeed table.

I’ve added some modifications to my bench to make it even more useful. After using a real, professional woodworking bench with a tail vise, I longed for a better way to clamp projects to my bench top to face plane them. I bought a matched pair of Veritas Bench Pups and Wonder Pups, and drilled a series of ¾” holes through the top. Now, I can plug in the pup, clamp it in place and face plane until my heart’s content.

Another awesome upgrade was adding an old Wilton vise to the front of the bench. It’s right there on the left corner. I experimented with several different configurations of where to site the vise, but the classic position for right-handed woodworkers suits me just fine. Edge planing boards is now a snap.

By the way, the vise itself is just as ugly at the bench is rides on. It was plucked from a dumpster behind a school that was doing away with its wood shop program. It must have been built in the 1960’s, coated in a light layer of oxidation and surface rust and has a handle made of a length of metal electrical conduit. I cleaned it up, put some southern yellow pine faces on it and it works like the day it was built.

Do I ever want to replace that ugly bench with something new and pretty? Sure I do. I get bench envy from time to time. I was at the American Sycamore Woodworker’s Retreat in Cloverdale, Indiana and saw a beautiful maple workbench with purpleheart inlays. Heavy mortise and tenon joinery. Dual screw tail vise. The thing looks more like an altar for some woodworking religion than a bench.

But, it didn’t have the character of mine.

Will I eventually replace my bench? Well, I have to confess that I have researched a number of plans from books, magazines and the Internet. But, every time I draw up a shopping list for wood and hardware – I find myself sitting at my old, ugly friend that has seen me through so many projects…

You know, I discovered I really am a loyal, sensitive guy.

Can I brag for a moment?

I have really good eyesight. I mean, REALLY good eyesight. As long as I can remember, I have been able to read license plates across a parking lot. This is quite a feat, considering the rest of my family has awful vision. Both of my brothers, my mom and my dad all wear glasses or contacts. To be fair, my dad’s glasses are reading glasses (that must be where I got the good eyesight from). But they are all amazed at just how much more detail I can see than they can.

Why, then, was I having trouble seeing what I was doing? Could it be that I was tackling my first really small project?

It was a simple one. Someone asked me to build a postage stamp holder – something funny, creative and made out of wood to hold a roll of stamps. I had the idea of building a very small band-sawn box that could do the job nicely. The lid was going to be held on by rare-earth magnets and a slot that would meter out a stamp at a time from the roll. There was even going to be an appropriate decoration paying tribute to the speed at which stamped letters travel compared to e-mail.

To make this vision a reality, I grabbed a chunk of maple, headed to the band saw, and immediately realized just how different the scale of the project was compared to others. This piece was small. I mean REALLY small. Three inches across and an inch and a half thick. And, once I cut the body of the box to size, I had to cut it into even smaller pieces to create a base and a lid.

As I cut the box from the chunk of maple, the tiny size of the project forced me to rethink nearly all of my construction practices. Well, it wasn’t actually the size of the project, but the close calls I kept having that caused me to sweat the details and count my fingers.

My band saw, normally a very well-behaved machine that gave me very few troubles in the past, provided me several frights. I will often scribe a line and freehand larger pieces through the saw, but those methods didn’t work on the small pieces. They had a nasty habit of slipping from my fingers and shooting across the shop.

Fairing the piece on my benchtop belt sander was another adventure in aerodynamics. Simply running the small piece against the belt – while preventing a nasty 120 grit manicure – allowed me to skip my cardio workout as I chased it all over the shop after it went flying.

Fortunately, before I had to run to the hospital, I realized I was going to need some shop jigs that would help me stay a perfect ten – on my hands, at least. Cutting jigs, sanding jigs and even drilling jigs helped me build the piece without a visit to a hand surgeon.

Sure, building jigs can seem like a pain in the butt. While you are in the flow of a project, you can get lost in the work you are creating. Taking time out to build something out of MDF that will never see the light of day can seem like an unnecessary waste of time, especially if you only have to make one more cut. You are indeed tempting fate.

When you feel like this, think for a minute just how long it will take you to get back into the swing of things after you finally get the all-clear from the medical folks.

Benjamin Franklin was right on the money when he said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Remember, if the little voice in your head is screaming, “Hey, dummy, that looks pretty scary,” you have got to listen. Hopefully, you’ll see how safe you can truly be! That’s so obvious, I’m surprised I didn’t see it earlier in the project.

I guess hindsight really is 20/20.

You know you are getting in way over your head when you are building projects so big, you can stand inside them. No, I’m not talking about carpenters building a house. Of course, those folks have to build projects big enough to stand in. Or at least crawl into – you know, something like a doghouse. (I’ve been there a few times after tracking sawdust in across the clean carpet).

And, no, I’m not talking about building a coffin – although, technically, you aren’t supposed to STAND in a coffin. It’s more of a reclining position.

I’m talking about woodworking and furniture projects that make your home complete. That’s exactly what happened to me late last year when I built an entertainment center for my family room. I had this grand vision of an entertainment center that would house a big screen TV (OK, it’s only 36″, but, the way my wife reacted, you’d think we had bought a movie theater screen and could charge admission), books, toys for my two sons, a whole host of electronics, DVDs, CDs, LCDs, VCRs and other ingredients in my alphabet soup.

My plan was pretty straightforward – build one central ‘box’ that would house the TV and storage, and two flanking ‘boxes’ that would serve as bookshelves. I would mount them to the wall up on a frame that I would level right on the concrete slab. This, I told my wife confidently, “was going to be so easy, a child could do it.”

I quickly realized, however, that I was probably going to have to turn to illegal child labor just to put the project together.

First of all, working by yourself on a large project can be the pits. Just imagine trying to square up a seven foot tall, two foot deep, four foot wide center box unit while assembling it on a 36″ by 80″ workbench. I pushed the piece off the edge at least a half dozen times trying to get it lined up.

Then, once I finally managed to get the sucker together and square, where the heck was I going to store it? I mean, I have a pretty decent sized shop – a 20′ x 26′ two-car garage, but that piece loomed larger than one of those monoliths they showed in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then, getting those three huge boxes inside. Without punching a hole in the walls. And knocking the nick-knacks off the shelves in our dining room … well, that was an adventure.

What got me through the project, ultimately, was the fact that I had VERY generous neighbors. One neighbor came by and offered me a second set of hands while I was assembling the monster case. Other neighbors offered to help me store the pieces in their garages while I assembled the job. And, when the time came to move and install, another neighbor came to my aid and kept me from putting the corner of the box through a window!

The moral of the story – get in friendly with your neighbors. If they are interested, they may be able to offer another set of hands when the big projects get tricky. Unfortunately, most will then ask you to build a huge project for their homes.

But, hey, at least you’ll have practice.

Yes, it’s true. I’m Tom Iovino, known as Tampa Tom far and wide, and I am a wood-a-holic. I have to admit this as part of my twelve step program. I knew I was in trouble when I started exhibiting the following symptoms (yes, it’s OK for you to admit that you too might be a wood-a-holic after reading this list):

• You race home from a hard day at work to put in a few hours in the shop.
• You start arranging your vacations and family schedule around woodworking expos.
• You can spend hours in a home improvement center turning every hand wheel, flipping every switch and checking the fit and finish of every power tool you see.
• You walk into a furniture store, drop to your knees and inspect the underside of every piece of furniture to see how it was built.
• You find yourself proclaiming, “I could build that,” when someone describes the need for a piece of furniture.

It’s not really a bad affliction when you think about it. Woodworking is the kind of addiction where you can actually accomplish something useful. A piece of furniture that can fill a need – and maybe even look good in the process. That’s always a good thing. Sometimes, I’ll use reverse psychology to get where I need to. For instance, a few years ago, we ran out of cabinet space in our kitchen. We couldn’t squeeze another box, pot or pan in there. So, I sketched out a design for a free-standing pantry that would fit into a perfect corner of the kitchen. I priced out the materials, and then looked for a pantry at a furniture store. The pre-made one cost considerably more than the materials, but I wasn’t convinced she would go for the deal. So, when I showed her the plans, I greased the skids a little – “That was a great idea you had for me to build a new pantry.”

She was sold.

My wife will get annoyed that I’ll spend the better part of a Saturday in the shop building something. But, once that piece gets into the house, everything seems to work itself out. She’ll even call the neighbors over to take a look at the finished piece. That’s when I have to strike while the iron’s hot – “Hey, honey, since I did a good job on that piece, what do you think about me building a (fill in the blank)?” If I say this in front of the neighbors while they are admiring the work, they’ll start asking about when the new project will be completed.

I call them my enablers.