Written 29 July 2026 · revised 30 July with prices read off the jem & fix shelf · saw + 4 sagbukker bought · companions: priser/JEMOGFIX-2026-07-30.md, SHOPPING-TRIP.md, saw-station-setup.html
Six questions, answered in build order: can you screw into the bukk (no — and you don't need to), how big the bench should be and what it is (1200 × 800, three parts, ~440 kr — and the wings are a separate thing), which panel (jem & fix limtre, at roughly half Byggmakker's price), do you need 48×48 (for the pallet shelf yes, for the bench no), where to cut the 4,8 m stick (§6 — not in half), and how much fits in the car (sticks: 2 m+, easily. Wide panels: much less — and that gap is the thing to design around).
30 July, after the shop visit. Three things changed. The 2000 mm “hylle” prices are no longer unknown (§5) — and the 2400 mm panel turns out to be cheaper in kroner than the shorter board. Benkeplater exist at 699–799 kr and would be a better bench top than the plywood if any of them fitted the car (§5). And the 48×48 comes in one length only, 4,8 m at 103 kr, which makes “where do I cut it” a real question with a specific answer (§6). The bench-top recommendation is unchanged: 12 mm kryssfiner, 800 × 1200, 379 kr — confirmed on the shelf.
The one rule that makes a one-saw workshop work: you have a mitre saw, which crosscuts to length. You have no way to rip. So every panel must be bought at its finished width — the shelf depth, the bench depth — and the only cut you ever make is across it. That means the widths on sale (200 / 250 / 300 / 400 / 500 / 600 mm) are your menu of shelf depths. Pick from the menu; don't design a depth and then hope.
Every height on this page is derived from three measurements, and I don't have any of them — published specs for these bukker disagree (Obs says 81 cm, a UK distributor says 73,6 cm for what looks like the same product). Ten minutes with a tape and the arithmetic below is exact.
Fair challenge, and the earlier note was too casual about it. The Stanley Junior's top is moulded polypropylene over a ribbed void, maybe 3–5 mm of wall thickness. A screw into it bites into thin plastic that has no fibre to grip. It'll feel tight on the first turn and strip on the second, and every time you rack the bench sideways — which sawing does constantly — it works the hole bigger. Within a few sessions the top is loose again, which is exactly the failure the “screw it down” advice was trying to prevent.
The bukk was never designed to be screwed into. It was designed with notches that take lumber on edge so that two bukker plus two planks make a beam pair, and then you put a sheet on that. Every screw goes wood-into-wood.
36×48 lekt — 36 mm because that's what fits the ≤40 mm notch.If the notch turns out to be shallow or oddly spaced — some bukker only take lumber running lengthwise — the fallback is the same idea one step simpler: screw the two battens to the underside so they sit just outside the bukk's beam on each side, like the lip on a chopping board. The top then can't slide in the one direction that matters, and still nothing touches plastic.
1200 long × 800 deep — and that isn't a number chosen because a plywood panel comes that way. It's what the derivation gives, and the panel happening to match is the luck.
| Dimension | Made of | Comes to |
|---|---|---|
| Length | saw base width (~600) + a 90 mm clampable lip each side | ≥ 780 → 1200 |
| Depth | saw base depth (~500) + 90 front + ~100 behind | ≥ 690 → 800 |
| Bukk spacing | set it to the saw's own left–right foot spacing, so each bukk stands directly under a pair of feet | ~500–600 |
| Behind it | free air for the slide rails — not bench, just nothing there | ~400 |
The one number I don't have is the saw's footprint, and you own the saw. Put a tape across the Skil's cast base, front-to-back and side-to-side, and measure the spacing of the four bolt-down holes. Sixty seconds, and every figure above stops being a typical-for-the-class estimate. If the base turns out deeper than ~620 mm, the 800 mm panel gets tight at the front and you want the bukker running the other way.
Why not longer than 1200? Because length past the saw is the wings' job, not the bench's. A longer bench needs a third bukk, stops folding flat, and still doesn't support a 2,4 m board — you'd need 2,4 m of bench to do that. The saw station is three surfaces on one line, and only the middle one is a bench:
“What about a hylle gran 18 × 400 × 2000, 479 kr?” (art. 9062751 — the 40×200 board on the shelf photo.) Right instinct, wrong surface. 400 mm is too shallow for the saw to stand on at all — the base alone is deeper than that — so it can't be the bench. But it is a very good wing: a 2 m flat surface at saw-table height beats the bare 36×98 plank-on-edge in §4, because you get somewhere to put a stop block and the offcuts instead of a knife edge.
The catch, and it's the recurring one: 400 mm is wider than the saw's 305 mm crosscut. You cannot cut that board — ever, with this saw. Buy it only if you want it whole. The 18 × 300 × 2000 at 369 kr can be crosscut, but with 5 mm of margin, which is not margin. The widest board you can comfortably cut is ~280 mm. Treat anything wider as a finished part the day you buy it.
That's the whole thing. Two bukker, one panel, two battens.
The panel is genuinely birch, and that's why 379 kr is the bargain it is. confirmed 30 Jul The product page for art. 9021536 (brand Hornbaek, made by Protræ A/S) states bjørk. Most plywood at that price in Norway is poplar or softwood: birch has more, thinner plies, roughly half again the density, holds a screw driven into its edge, and doesn't crush under a clamp. On a bench top — which is a clamped, screwed, dented surface — that difference is the whole product.
The glue is water-resistant, not waterproof. Fine for an unheated garage; not fine for rain, and not fine stored flat on gravel or concrete, which wicks. Store it on edge, off the floor. And sight along it in the shop before you take it — plywood cups in a rack, and a cupped bench top is a bench top you'll fight forever.
| Part | What | Where | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top | Kryssfiner bjørk 12 × 800 × 1200 mm — art. 9021536, confirmed 30 Jul Hornbaek / Protræ A/S. Arrives at exactly the right size, needs no cut, lies flat in the boot | jem & fix | 379 |
| Battens ×2 | 36 × 48 lekt, 2 × 1200 mm — cut from one 2,4 m stick with the new saw | Obs Bygg / jem & fix | ~50 |
| Screws | 4,0 × 50 TX20 — the box you're buying anyway. Through 12 mm ply into a 48 mm batten leaves 38 mm of bite and 10 mm of margin before it exits. | on the list already | — |
| Total | a real bench with a clampable edge on all four sides | ≈ 430 kr |
Why 12 mm ply is enough here, when the earlier note said 15–18. Unribbed, 12 mm over a 750 mm span with a saw bolted to it would visibly bounce. Ribbed with two 48 mm battens on edge, stiffness goes up roughly with the cube of the effective depth — the batten, not the ply, is carrying the load. This is the same reason a floor is joists plus thin decking rather than one thick slab.
You bought four. Two are the bench. The other two are the thing that actually determines whether your cuts come out square: outriggers at exactly the saw's own table height. The saw's table sits ~90–100 mm above whatever it's bolted to, so a bukk on its own is far too low — a 2 m board rests on the bukk, tips, and lifts off the saw fence mid-cut.
Shim with something you can trim. Corrugated cardboard is ~1,5 mm a layer and a stack of it under the plank gets you to the millimetre in thirty seconds. Once it's right, glue the stack together and write “OUTRIGGER” on it in marker so you never re-derive it.
Your instinct at Byggmakker was correct: 18 mm limtre hobbyplate is the right material for shelving in a shop with no rip capability. It comes flat, stable, already at a usable width, and every joint you make is a butt joint on a square edge. It is not the right material for the bench top though — plywood is stiffer per krone and doesn't care about grain direction.
What surprised me is the price spread. Identical spec, identical 18 mm laminated pine:
| 18 mm limtre panel | jem & fix | kr/m² | Byggmakker | kr/m² |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18 × 600 × 2400 | 489 | 340 | 959 | 666 |
| 18 × 400 × 2400 | 389 | 405 | 639 | 666 |
| 18 × 500 × 2400 | — | — | 839 | 699 |
| 18 × 300 × 2400 | — | — | 479 | 665 |
| 18 × 250 × 2400 | — | — | 399 | 665 |
| 18 × 200 × 2400 | — | — | 399 | 831 |
| 18 × 600 × 1200 | — | — | 599 | 832 |
| 18 × 400 × 1200 | — | — | 339 | 706 |
| 18 × 300 × 1200 | — | — | 259 | 719 |
| 18 × 200 × 1200 | — | — | 189 | 787 |
| massiv gran 18 × 300 × 1000 | 129 | 430 | — | — |
| massiv gran 18 × 200 × 1000 | 99,90 | 500 | — | — |
Three things fall straight out of that table:
added 29 Jul Since 2 m of narrow stock does go in (§7), a second jem & fix range becomes relevant that the price table above misses entirely: untreated pine and spruce shelf boards at 2000 mm, in 18 and 28 mm thickness and 200 / 300 / 400 mm widths. At 28 mm these are noticeably stiffer than 18 mm limtre — sag goes with the cube of thickness, so 28 mm is roughly three and a half times stiffer than 18 mm at the same span. For a bookshelf that's the difference between needing supports every 600 mm and getting away with 800.
The aggregators had disagreed by a factor of five on these (100 / 339 / 489 kr for the same article), so the previous version of this page refused to guess and said read them off the shelf. Done — 30 July 2026:
| Hylle, 2000 mm long | 200 mm | 300 mm | 400 mm | kr/m² |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| gran / furu 18 mm | 249 | 369 | 479 | 599–622 |
| furu 28 mm | — | 569 | 719 | 899–948 |
| eik 16 mm | 449 | 699 | 899 | 1 123–1 165 |
The 2400 panel is cheaper in kroner than the 2000 board. Hylle limtre 18 × 400 × 2400 is 389 kr; hylle gran 18 × 400 × 2000 is 479 kr. Same thickness, same width, 20 % more wood, 90 kr less.
So the 2 m boards are not a cheaper range — they are a transport range, and you pay a 90 kr premium for the privilege of getting them home. That's a fine trade on one board and a bad one on six. Put the two side by side and check the grade before assuming they're identical stock; the article-number series differ (9066927 vs 9062751).
The 28 mm furu is the real find in that table: 569 kr for 300 × 2000. It is the
stiffness this page was hoping for, at ~50 % more per m² than the 18 mm — for a shelf that actually
carries books, that is the honest buy. Full transcribed price list, 60-odd lines, in
priser/JEMOGFIX-2026-07-30.md.
added 30 Jul Not in the panel aisle at all — stacked flat on pallet racking. 28 mm laminate worktop, 610 mm wide: 699 kr at 2600 mm, 799 kr at 3000 mm (≈437 kr/m²); untreated solid furu 28 × 610 × 2000 at 999 kr.
On the merits this beats 12 mm plywood as a bench top and it isn't close: heavier (the granite-look
one is 35 kg, and mass is what stops a bench walking), flatter, wipes clean, and PVA won't stick to
laminate — the same property that makes melamine the ideal book-press platen
(HOBBY-BRIEF.md §4). §8 of this page already said “a used worktop from finn.no
would be better than the ply”. Here it is new, for 799 kr.
And every one of them is 610 mm wide × 2,0–3,0 m long — precisely the wide-and-flat shape that the Fabia caps at 1520 mm (§7), and 610 mm cannot be crosscut on a 305 mm mitre saw. There is no version of this that fits in the car and no way to make it fit once it's home.
File it as the upgrade: takstativ, trailer, or a borrowed van. Worth one question at the counter — does jem & fix cut? Danish discount yards usually don't, but a single crosscut at 1200 mm would solve the entire problem for a few kroner.
jem & fix sells white-faced hobbyplate at 399 kr for 18×600×2400 (≈277 kr/m²) — cheaper than any real wood. It's MDF or particleboard under the melamine. For a garage utility shelf holding boxes, fine. For books, no: 18 mm MDF at 700+ mm unsupported span visibly sags under book load and never comes back, and in an unheated garage the edges swell if they ever get damp. Real wood or plywood for anything that has to stay straight.
Verified 30 July 2026. The jem & fix column above came from their web catalogue and has now been read off the shelf: 18 × 600 × 2400 = 489 kr and 18 × 400 × 2400 = 389 kr, both confirmed, and the white hobbyplate is 399 kr for 18 × 600 × 2400 and 229 kr for 18 × 300 × 2400. The Byggmakker column is still web-sourced. The ratio — roughly half price for the same spec — survives contact with the shelf.
You're right that it looks chunky. It isn't large by construction standards — it's under two inches — but it's the wrong stick for some of these jobs.
| Job | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Pallet shelf posts project #0 | 48 × 48 yes | These are load columns under 25 kg fertiliser sacks. Also: a 48 mm face gives you room to drive a screw in from the side without splitting an edge. Cheapest thing that's obviously strong enough. |
| Bookshelf posts | 48 × 48 yes | Post stiffness is what stops the Ivar wobble. Don't economise here. |
| Bench battens | 36 × 48 not 48×48 | 48 mm won't fit the bukk's ≤40 mm notch. 36 mm will. |
| Outrigger planks | 36 × 98 or 36 × 148 | Same reason — 36 mm thickness to seat in the notch, the 98/148 is the height you need to reach saw-table level. |
| Diagonal braces | 21 × 70 lekt | A brace works in tension/compression along its length; thickness buys nothing. |
Yes. You buy the stick, not the piece. The offcut is yours to take home or leave in their bin. But there's a much better move available at Obs Bygg specifically:
Obs Bygg prices 48×48 ubehandlet per metre — 24,90 kr/m — and sells it “i fallende lengder”, i.e. mixed lengths straight from the rack. So a 4,8 m stick is ~120 kr and a 2,4 m stick is ~60 kr, and you are not forced to take the long one. Dig through the rack for the shortest sticks that cover your cut list. That solves the transport problem and the “paying for wood I'll never use” problem in one move.
Lekter kl.1 G-F 48×48, 4,8 m — 103 kr, and 4,8 m is the only length they stock.
The label prints 21,46 in the corner as pris pr. M, which makes it the
cheapest 48×48 found in Hamar: 14 % under Obs Bygg's 24,90 kr/m, and well under the 129 kr
Byggmax/Bergene Holm reference for the same stick.
But that 14 % is worth about 50 kr, and it costs you a hand-cut in the car park. For the ~10,4 m of parts below: five 2,4 m sticks at Obs = 299 kr and they go straight in the car. Three 4,8 m sticks at jem & fix = 309 kr and none of them fits.
So the falling-lengths rack wins if it's real — that claim is still web-sourced and unverified. If Obs's rack is all 4,8 m that day, it's 359 kr for the same wood and the same car-park cut, and jem & fix is the buy. Either way, keep a handsaw in the car.
The stick doesn't fit the car, so the first cut is a transport cut, made in the car park with a handsaw before anything else happens. Where you put it decides everything downstream — and the temptation is to halve it, because halving is what you do when you don't have a plan.
Don't halve it. 2 × 2400 is right at the limit of what threads past the front seats (§7), and it forces a second decision later. Cut to parts instead, and let the stock length choose the part length rather than the other way round:
Why 1970 and not 2000. Because 2000 doesn't leave room for the two short posts, and 20 mm of bookshelf height is worth nothing to you. This is the move that answers your question generally: when stock comes in one fixed length, pick your part length to divide it, not to match a round number in your head. A 1970 mm bookshelf is exactly as good as a 2000 mm one and costs 30 % less wood across the build.
Why 400 for the short posts. The pallet-shelf post wants to be
350–450 mm, decided by measuring a fertiliser sack. 400 sits mid-range and drops out of the
arithmetic for free. If the sack says otherwise, anything from 350 to 415 still fits the offcut.
(SHOPPING-TRIP.md §5 is where that range comes from.)
| Sticks | kr | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 103 | 2 posts + 2 short posts. Enough to start, not enough to finish either project. |
| 3 the buy | 309 | 6 × 1970 and 6 × 400. The six pallet-shelf posts, exactly. Four bookshelf posts for one bay, plus two spare that become rungs, outrigger blocks and stop blocks. |
Sight the stick before you mark it. Cheap lekt bows and twists, and post straightness is most of what stops the Ivar wobble. Sight down all three, and put the straightest 2 m runs where the 1970s fall — mark the cut lines around the bad bits, not at a fixed distance from the end. That's a real optimisation and it's free.
Cut long in the car park (mark 1990, cut on the waste side) and square both ends at home on the mitre saw. A handsaw cut is not square and doesn't need to be — it's a transport cut, and every end that matters gets re-cut anyway.
On cutting services, one thing worth knowing before you plan around it: Byggmax has no cutting service — it's a self-service drive-in yard with a bench and a loaner handsaw. Obs Bygg, Byggmakker, Maxbo and Montér normally do have a kappesag, usually with a per-cut fee, but ring first rather than arriving with a 4,8 m plan. And as you found, nobody rips lengthwise for retail customers, which is why §0 is the rule it is.
revised 29 Jul The car is the Fabia III estate —
confirmed by the VIN, where position 4 (TMBJR6NJ…) denotes estate
body, LHD, single-axle drive. Worth knowing for ordering roof bars later: Škoda's own name
for the estate is “Combi”, so a Fabia Combi is the stasjonsvogn —
same car, and every accessory catalogue lists it that way.
The published figure of 1520 mm is real but narrower in meaning than I first wrote it. It is the flat rectangle on the boot floor with the rear backrests down — and the Fabia's folded backrests leave a step, so that's a conservative measure taken at floor level. It is not the longest thing that goes in the car. Two metres of stick goes in easily, over the step and forward into the footwell.
So there are two separate limits, and only one of them is 1520 mm:
Long and narrow — lekt, planke, a single shelf board on edge — rides over the folded backrests, angled up into the passenger footwell or threaded past the front seats. 2000 mm is comfortable; ~2400 mm is reachable with the passenger seat slid forward.
Wide and flat — a 400–600 mm panel — can't tilt, can't thread, can't use the diagonal. It's stuck with the floor rectangle, and that's where 1520 mm bites.
Get your own number before the next trip. Fold the seats, put a tape on the floor from the tailgate to the front seat backs, and then run it again along the top of the folded backrests to the windscreen. Two measurements, sixty seconds, and every future “will it fit?” is settled.
Three separate things have to be true, and the first one probably isn't:
A 4,8 m lekt on a Fabia roof is legal-if-marked and still a bad idea. Crossbars on a Fabia are maybe 70–90 cm apart. A 4,8 m stick clamped over that span is a 2 m lever at each end — it flexes, drums, and levers on the mounts at motorway speed. If you're going to carry 4,8 m stock, it wants a proper long-load setup or a trailer, neither of which you have.
Buy short instead. With Obs Bygg selling by the metre in falling lengths, nothing forces you to.
Everything in one trip to the Olrud/Furnes cluster. This gets the bench built and project #0 done, and buys nothing you'd regret.
| Stop | Item | kr | Fits the car? |
|---|---|---|---|
| jem & fix Holabekkvegen 46, Furnes · man–lør 8–19 |
Kryssfiner bjørk 12 × 800 × 1200 — the bench top | 379 | ✓ flat in the boot |
| Trefiberplate 2,5 mm 610 × 1220 — sacrificial layer, and it doubles as the book-press platen | 49,90 | ✓ flat in the boot | |
| optional Hylle limtre 18 × 400 × 2400 — cheapest per m² | 389 | ✕ needs roof or a cut | |
| optional Hylle furu 28 × 300 × 2000 — stiffer, and it fits | 569 | ✓ over the fold | |
| Obs Bygg Olrud |
Lekt 36 × 48, one short stick → 2 battens @1200. not stocked at jem & fix — the one thing on this list with no confirmed source | ~50 | ✓ threaded through |
| 48 × 48 ubehandlet — pick the shortest sticks in the rack, ~2,4 m, for the six pallet-shelf posts. If the rack is all 4,8 m, buy 3 at jem & fix for 103 and cut per §6 | ~60/stk | ✓ threaded through | |
| Obs Bygg / Biltema | Skruer 4,0×50 TX20 og 5,0×40 TX25 · borforsenkersett · trelim D3 · vinkelhake · 2 tvinger | ~400 | ✓ |
| Total | bench + project #0 + the hardware you'd buy anyway | ≈ 900–1 300 |
What I would not buy on this trip: a 1220×2440 sheet of anything. At 178 kr/m² the 12 mm plywood sheet is by far the cheapest surface material in Hamar — less than half the small panel's rate — but it doesn't fit the car, nobody will rip it for you, and you don't yet own a way to break it down. Once the bench exists and you've added a straightedge saw guide, full sheets become the obvious buy. That's the upgrade, not the start.
Worth asking while they're still boxed. The honest scoring: they are not the absolute cheapest trestle in Hamar, but they're the right one, and table legs solve a different problem than the one you have.
| Option | 4 supports | What you get | What breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stanley STST1-70355 what you bought | 798 | 362 kg/pair · folds to 8,9 cm · ≤40 mm notches · rubber feet · tool tray | fixed height; racks unless weighted |
| Obs Bygg bordben Ø30 mm, 90 cm | 596 | brushed steel, ~20 mm of levelling adjustment | no load rating published; furniture hardware; nothing folds; no bracing |
| Biltema/Jula “sagbukk” from the motorsag aisle | ~400–680 | cheap, steel, folds | wrong tool — see below. Jula's is rated 100 kg. |
| Kellen sagbord, Obs Bygg | 999 | saw brackets · wheels · adjustable feet · arms 118–198 cm | no work surface at all — you'd still buy a bench |
A Norwegian-language trap I walked into in the earlier brief. “Sagbukk” means two unrelated tools: the carpenter's trestle (what you bought) and the firewood sawbuck that holds a log while you chainsaw it. The cheap 100–170 kr ones at Biltema and Jula, filed under motorsagtilbehør, are the second kind — V-shaped, toothed, and useless as bench legs. The earlier “you could have paid less at Biltema” note was comparing against the wrong product. Biltema's actual work trestle is the arbeidsbukk, in the painting aisle, and it is not meaningfully cheaper.
DUST.md's conclusion was to
work outdoors or on the driveway for the first sessions and build a platform later. A bench on
fixed legs lives permanently wherever you assembled it. These fold to 89 mm and go with you.The one purchase that would genuinely beat this is the Kellen sagbord at 999 kr — adjustable feet (the real answer to gravel) and 118–198 cm arms (outriggers, solved properly). It's still the right upgrade once the station stops moving. But it gives you no work surface, which is the thing you currently have none of, so it's an addition later — not a reason to return anything now.