The workshop behind the plans
BenchWorks plans come out of a professional furniture-making workshop, not a drawing board. Every design here exists because the workshop needed it, couldn’t buy it, and engineered it — then used it daily, in production, before a single plan was sold.
How a plan is made here
- A real problem. Working on clients’ floors. Glue-ups hogging the main bench. Ten single-purpose carts the shop has no room for.
- Months of design. The MFTC took 10 months and 2 prototypes. The MFSC was sketched in 2014 and only solved — lift mechanism, side arms — in 2017.
- Daily professional use. Designs are corrected from real wear, real jobsites, real production, before the manual is written.
- A manual anyone can follow. Step-by-step photos, dimensioned parts, templates, a 3D model — and honest notes about the hard parts.
The community made it global
From the first awkward workshop video in 2011 to builds in Pittsburgh, London, Toronto and Bratislava, this has always been a conversation: builders send photos, suggest mods (bigger wheels! router extensions!), and translate. The French translation of the MFTC plans was graciously contributed by Manu of the kokumotsu blog — merci.
The plans are designed by Belgian furniture maker Timothy Wilmots; the workshop and the community do the rest.