On the material for a new workbench.
Last fall I moved from Massachusetts to Beijing. My workbenches were sold, or in a container somewhere at sea, promised to the Zen-Wu showroom anyway. I had sold my collection of slabs too. So I needed new benches, one at home and one in the new workshop, and no material to build them from. I was careful about the choice, because in the back of my mind I want to commercialize this bench someday: to help more people get into woodworking, or to pull a few machine woodworkers into handwork. A mission with a made-up purpose, the way most of ours are.
First things first, the material. It had to be properly dry, hard, tough, straight-grained, quartersawn, nearly indifferent to seasonal moisture, preferably not too dark, and responsibly, sustainably grown and harvested. I was prepared to pay handsomely for something like that.
China has been a big importer of foreign timber since the Song dynasty, by which point we had slowly worked through most of our own old-growth reserves. Imported tropical hardwood became the sought-after wood and has stayed in demand ever since. It meets my functional requirements, but the boards I was looking at are not sustainably harvested, no matter what the lumberyard says. Hard pass. Too dark anyway.
Then there is wood from North America and Europe. Believe it or not, some Chinese lumberyards price it at or below what I see in the States. I have heard that some logs are shipped offshore, milled and dried, then sent back to the States, and it still comes out cheaper than doing it all there. I am not an expert in that trade, so I will shut up. In any case, these options are familiar and often properly dried, with the usual selections: beech, hard maple, and yes, yellow pine. I also looked at the responsibly managed species grown here, mainly eucalyptus, elm, and white pine. Too soft, or too lively with the seasons, so I had to pass on them too. Southern yellow pine survived the cut.
I was setting up an appointment at a drying and steaming facility, starting to plan production for some engineered southern yellow pine, when I walked into a tea shop. The entire place was built of bamboo. And I thought: wait.
Bamboo shows little anisotropy in transverse shrinkage: most wood shrinks about twice as much tangentially as radially, while bamboo shrinks about the same in both directions, so it cannot build up much of the internal tension that cups and twists boards. It also shrinks less overall, roughly half as much as maple in the tangential direction. This is a biological miracle, especially from a plant that is always straight-grained and matures in three to four years.
So instead of the drying facility, I went to Taojiang in Hunan province, home to the largest contiguous bamboo forest on the planet.
On the way there, Claude began to criticize my material choice. (I wanted to say wood choice, but bamboo is a grass.) He, or it, or they, was pretty convincing: bamboo carries a high silica content, which is not friendly to edge tools. What if someone needs to drill holdfast holes, or retrofit a wagon vise? A nightmare to work afterward, to say nothing of the manufacturing on my end. But I was already on the train. So, vacation.
The bamboo is harvested on the hills and brought down through a series of slides, then split and stripped to a standard 8 × 20 stock, in millimeters of course, known in the business and by the locals as "strips." The method is ancient: people have been splitting bamboo into strips for about as long as people have used bamboo. Stripping removes the greenish outside and the yellowish inside of the culm, leaving the middle. I asked why. The silica sits at the surfaces, they told me; with the outer and inner faces removed, you keep the part that is pretty and not abrasive. On the bright side, Claude apologized the instant I relayed this on the way back.
Not much is wasted, either. The skins, the piths, and the shavings get carbonized into hard carbon, the anode material in sodium-ion batteries. I learned this over dinner in Taojiang with a Hunan University professor who works on exactly that.
The strips then pass through a high-temperature dryer and sanitizer, and because they are only 8 mm thick (5/16"), they come out the other side under 8% moisture content throughout. That is when they are ready for glue-up. The strips are glued on a specialized press with heat-activated glue, either lying flat or standing on edge, called horizontal- and vertical-laminated bamboo in the business (you will also see flatwise and edgewise). The names follow how the strip lies, not where the glue goes: a horizontal panel is glued edge to edge, a vertical panel face to face.
After the first lamination, the panels can themselves be laminated in multiple layers on a horizontal gluing press. Four iterations later, the pattern I ended up with is a five-layer design.
The benchtop runs vertical-horizontal-vertical-horizontal-vertical, with the two horizontal plies turned 90 degrees to form a ply; the working surface is vertical bamboo, narrow edges up. The leg and stretcher stock uses the same five layers, but with the horizontal plies running the same direction as the vertical ones.
I'm bringing an early prototype to Handworks 2026, September 4 and 5 in Amana, Iowa. I believe this is the world's first bamboo hand-tool bench. For those who are interested, come and try it out.
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