Building A Garage Workbench

With our kids having recently moved out, we're rearranging our house and getting rid of a lot of stuff. That means my dream workshop in the garage is finally within reach. I'm a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, so the workshop will be used for basic woodworking, rebuilding cars and other odds and ends. It's going to be strictly functional and not a glamorous man cave.

The first thing I want to make is a wall-mounted, 8' x 30" workbench. Thanks to the Interweb Tubes, I've found sound designs, material lists and am now working my way through suggestions for the workbench top. I stopped at Home Depot yesterday and viewed some options. Here's a partial list.

• Stainless steel. This gets a lot of play on the forums, but I've worked on it before and unless I'm cooking, I don't see the point of it. It's cold, hard, noisy and glares in the light.
• MDF or particle board. It's inexpensive, but it disintegrates under many conditions. It swells when wet and disintegrates. Dent it and it disintegrates. Bash the side and it disintegrates. Meh.
• Corian. This is the low-end counter top you would use in a bathroom or kitchen. Hard and durable, you can easily get these with molded backsplashes. I looked at these at Home Depot, but wondered what would happen when I missed with a hammer blow. Cracking and chipping, for certain.
• Plywood. This is what I'm leaning towards right now. From the forum linked above, the pros use two layers of it. The first is a base and the top is essentially disposable. I'm going to go with 2 layers of 3/4" plywood, which I can get for about $25 a sheet. I'll sand and varnish it so it will be easier to clean. If I bash it, it will just dent. If I need to further protect it during some work, I can always roll out a little auto trunk liner carpet or something like that. Since it's not conductive, I can do electrical work on it, too. One of the commenters on that forum recommended a layer of tempered hardboard on the top as a very disposable work surface.

This is tempered hardboard. I had to look it up.

My only concern now is how to design hard points into the the bench so I can affix clamps and vises to it. I'm not sure if I want a vice permanently attached. I think I'll learn about the topic, build the bench to that can be retrofitted and then use the bench for a while and see how it works.

Update: Here's how to mount a vise on a workbench. Pretty straightforward stuff. Bolt it as close to the edge as possible so the mouth of the vise hangs over the edge for working with tall things. You can reinforce the bench beneath the vise with 2x4s if you want. Definitely something I can retrofit. That's a good thing, because I don't own a vise.