Ideas for really compact bench

[Trizza]

This is part workshop tour, part past mistakes, and part project planning

Living in an apartment has its downsides! For a long time I've been aching to get more serious about my on again off again woodworking hobby, and lately its got too much for me to resist.

So, my situation:
- I live in an 8th floor apartment.
- My only available work space is my balcony (which is glassed-in and has a heater, so it is usable even in winter - although it does get to -20C here in Finland)
- I'm a hand-tool-only user (due to building noise regulations)

So far I've been building a few things on an offcut from an IKEA laminate kitchen worktop from our recent kitchen renovation, supported by a couple of cheap trestles from the same place. I've bolted a vise onto it, so its good enough for the odd thing here or there. Recently I even built an electric guitar on it. But I've outgrown it I think.

The balcony is about 3.5m long by 1.8m wide, the shorter walls are solid concrete and the other two are glass. I'm mostly only interested in building small things so I'm thinking of making a short wall-mounted bench to fold up, just underneath the heater. For bigger projects I'd pay for time in a local community college workshop.

Any thoughts? I've seen Boz62's thread about his small Roubo, that was pretty inspiring!

Here's my current "bench" before adding the vise and weights across the bottom slats to stabilize it some:

And with the vise in place, planing the radius into a fretboard with my prototype Krenov plane:

Lacking planing stops (for now) in my bench, I drove some screws into some cheap alder and chucked that in the vice. Great makeshift way to plane thin stock

So - what would you folks do in my situation?

 

[Boz62]

Thankyou Trizza [blushes]. Have you seen Alf's article on a Benchtop Bench? Could be a nice compact solution for a handtool user, just bolt is on top of your trestles? This forum had a phase where several people built such things, so I think there may be some posts several years ago here as well.

Good luck
Boz

 

[Karl]

Would something like this bench by Gary Blum be of any use? He does three sizes.

Cheers

Karl

 

[Chris Knight]

Your bench (any bench in fact) will be a lot more stable if you able to fix it in some way to a wall - either behind the bench or at either end. Planing particularly is much easier if the bench isn't trying to escape all the time!

 

[Trizza]

Thankyou Trizza [blushes]. Have you seen Alf's article on a Benchtop Bench? Could be a nice compact solution for a handtool user, just bolt is on top of your trestles?

Cute I can see a lot of uses for that in luthiery, but I can't see it holding up to much rough stock prep. I've earmarked it for the future anyhow

Would something like this bench by Gary Blum be of any use?

I saw a link to those some time ago but had forgotten them, they do look excellent! Something like that would be great. Sadly the price is quite high for what it is, but the principle looks simple enough to duplicate.

Your bench (any bench in fact) will be a lot more stable if you able to fix it in some way to a wall - either behind the bench or at either end. Planing particularly is much easier if the bench isn't trying to escape all the time!

Yeah, the plan is definitely to leash it to the concrete wall so it stops trying to escape my inexpert planing attempts - I don't blame it, I'd run away from me too! To the left of the pictures is a nice solid concrete wall that I can drill holes in.