What hight do y'all use for your workbench building hight? Right now mine is a little too tall for sitting in an old dining room chair, and a little too short for standing (lower back pain). Suggestions, comments, photos?

31" works for me. Actually 28 or 29 would be better but I'm too lazy to modify my workbench.

Bill

Mine is 29" and I use a computer chair. Works out pretty good. This was our living room which wasn't really being used for anything but furniture sitting since we have a family room. Yes, it did take some convincing on her part.

Mine is 40" tall, 2' deep and 8' long. Perfect to stand up and work at or sit on bar stool and work. I took me a couple of hours to figure out how tall I wanted it but I finally sat on the bar stool and decided that I wanted the bottom of the bench to be atleast 1 1/2" above my legs. I framed it out with 2x4's and used piece of 3/4" sanded ply for the top and I sanded it even more for a nice, smooth, dead flat surface.

Mine is 36" from the floor. I can stand and reach all the way across (table is 4 ft' wide), but I don't have to bend very much when working at it standing up. A bar stool works for me to sit down when I want, I trimmed the legs a little. I'm 5'11" and the tabletop hits me right where I bend at the hip. I also have back pain, so height was important to me, too, but I wanted to be able to reach across the table.. If you don't have as wide a table, maybe a tad higher would work better for you.

I have one thats about 50" tall. Used mostly for doing alignment and final setup. Another is about 30" which is an old shop table from a high school. About 5' square. I use it for general building and covering. After back surgery, I find it better on me to be able to move around a lot. Any one position causes problems after more than 20 minutes or so. I also store all my building wood under the shop table.
Edwin

Rather than modify the workbench height, I suggest trying a bar stool or one of the kitchen step "thingys" that have 2 steps and the seat can fold up.

I have degenerative arthritus of the spine and I found that the kitchen step thingy works fine for me. When I sit, the work bench is the right height. The bench is low for standing, but I do 95%+ of my building and repairing while sitting.

The two accepted standards are 30" for a chair and 36" for standing but you can make it whatever height you need or even put shims under your existing leggs to try to stop the back pain.

Stand up.

Arms at your sides.

Now bend your elbows so your hands are straight out in front of you.

Measure the distance from the bottom of your elbow to the floor.

That's how high you want your workbench.

Kind of depends on how you like to work too, if you like to be sitting and looking over your work. My bench is 30 inches and sometimes when I'm sitting in my computer chairs it's too high when I want to be looking down on my work and just A bit too low when I'm standing. Sort of A personal thing and they never seem to be right all the time.

The exact response I was going to give. This rule of thumb has been circulated by woodworkers for decades. If you want to sit at the bench then modify a stool to put you at the ideal height.

Yep. You don't need work benches at different heights to accommodate standing or sitting. You build one work bench at the height described above and then you chop the legs off a bar stool to fit for when you are sitting instead of standing.

My building table is on trestles that are adjustable in height from 28" to 36 5/8". My trestles happens to be from [link=http://www.ikea.com/us/en/]IKEA[/link], but you can easily build something similar from scratch.

I am 5'10" tall and my bench is 37" tall. I usually work standing up but when I want to sit I use a bar stool like some of the other contributors. The work surface is 60" by 80" and is covered by screwed down hollow core doorscheap, flat, and accept pins very well. One half is for putting together arfs and the other half always has a kit being built.

Here's mine... 4.5 x 8.5 top, 34.5 inches high.

Beautiful plane and bench