Restoring a vintage factory workbench - photos

[NeiljohnUK]

Reminds me of a bench I sorted in an optics lab some 20+ years ago, the bench was ~20 feet long by 2 wide and had due to excessive cyclic wetting and drying warped it's top surface (2" thick oak planks), whilst metal benches were the norm they weren't commonly available in the size required nor were they suitable for this 'wet' experiment, so I spent a week of working time, spread over several, using different hand planes, mainly a No. 8, to bring it back to an acceptable state for the experiment to be remounted and continued. It would have taken less time but my manager bought a new fangled electric plane to speed things up, with which he did much damage very quickly, and due to the short sole made the surface irregularity worse not better. When that bench was finally retired it ended up in a garden shed, not as a bench top machine mount for which it would have been ideal, but for potting plants, but we did have many beers around/on it for it's retirement party!