Ingenious Mechanicks, Christopher Schwarz

Ingenious Mechanicks by Christopher Schwarz. Workbenches with screw-driven vises are a fairly modern invention. For more than 2,000 years, woodworkers built complex and beautiful furniture using simpler benches that relied on pegs, wedges and the human body to grip the work. While it's easy to dismiss these ancient benches as obsolete, they are at most misunderstood.

For three years, Schwarz built these ancient workbenches and put them to work in his shop to build all manner of furniture. Absent any surviving instruction manuals, he relied on hundreds of historical paintings for clues to how they worked, then replicated the devices and techniques shown to see how, or if, they worked. The book takes the reader from Pompeii, with the oldest image of a Western bench, to a Roman fort in Germany to inspect the oldest surviving workbench, and finally to his shop in Kentucky, where he recreated three historical workbenches and dozens of early jigs.

These early benches have many advantages:
They are less expensive to build
They can be built in a couple of days
They require less material
You can sit down to use them
They take up less space than a modern bench and can even serve as seating in your house
In some cases they perform better than modern vises or shavehorses

Even if you have no plans to build an early workbench, the book is filled with rediscovered ideas you can put to work on your modern bench: an incredibly versatile shaving station made from four small pieces of wood, a hard-gripping face vise made with a notch and some softwood wedges, and the best planing stop ever, made with a stick of oak and some rusty nails. Published by Lost Art Press.