An Alternative to Bench Dogs | Paul Sellers

I want to talk today about clamping your work to your work bench sometimes you know there's a lot of different ways that you can clamp your work down to the worktop but I want to talk about putting the clamp in the vise and using this very cheap effective controllable way of clamping your work securely if you are just starting in woodworking you've got a bench going you don't have a dogging system you haven't bought into a dogging system and you want to just clamp some things to your workbench for working that material and show you some alternative that will help you to get started it's primarily to get you off the ground up and running as fast as and effectively as you can and I've used this system for 50 years I find it works very well I have a couple of clamps like these these are square clamps their box clamps so they are very good what I've done is I've taken what was hollow and I've just taken a piece of wood and fitted it into this clamp and then I've put a little dimple in this side on this side to hold it in place so I've retrofitted the clamps all of my clamps have that in it gives it a little extra talk they're inexpensive clamps they probably cost under 10 pounds or under $10 if you're in the US I'm not sure about Australia and places like that mainland Europe but I'm sure you can get them for a similar price these are aluminium or aluminum they work great I found them very effective but let me give you the first level that I might want to use this clump for is to clamp something in the vise that I might want to work that I can't put deep into the vise and this might be one situation where let's say I wanted to make this hexagonal all round I can clump this in the vise this way and I can remove the corners with a spokeshave I can do different things because it's in this position so here for instance here I want to make a hexagon here so I'm just using a heavy spokeshave I'm going against the grain as you can tell so I just turn it around and I can make this square section of wood round without using the lathe and then I can go to a finer spokeshave like this one so I hugged off with the heavy one now if I wanted to make this round I would go in here like this so you can see how effectively this holds my workpiece I can't really put this in the vise because I would be too near my knuckles would be catching on the bench this is a very effective way for securing your material now if you wanted to change what are the situations that occur to most woodworkers when they're making anything is they have to clamp something that's too big for the vise mostly so this vise extends to 12 inches it opens up to 12 inches I can't get a regular piece a big piece of plywood in there say something like this here's a piece of plywood I might want to secure this for many different reasons so I just set the distance on my clamp here like this that's close enough and then what I do is I just set this in the vise like this I want to see I want to get the head below this 3/4 inch this is 3/4 plywood so I want to be below this and I want to be the same on this end here so I just slacking off lift up just a hair get this equal to both ends now if I clamp without any spacer in here this is going to flex so I just have a u-shaped piece of pine the same distance as this distance between the clamp and the edge of my bench so that fits there and I can move this anywhere on here depending on the length of the material that I'm going to be working with so here for instance now I cinch up my piece of plywood which could be a frame it could be a tabletop it could be solid wood it could be MDF it could be just about anything and once I have this set here I am ready to work this piece of material so if I pull here it will flex but most of my work is going to be pushing this way or pushing this way if I was scraping for instance like this and I wanted to take off these marks from my layout each I often do I can take off this surface quite easily and and work my material all the way out to this outer edge I can work from this close to this clump head like this and work down from this end and that gives me a nice secure feeling when I'm working with the material which is what I want I want this secure feeling well I'm working so that gets me a whole tabletop let's say I wanted to go across the workbench let's say I've got a very long tabletop to work on I can work across the edge here now there's one thing you would have to watch possibly and that was going to be the edges of the table if you've already finished your table I usually leave mine slightly oversized so I can take my plane or my scraper and I can scrape this way to across here this is very nice and solid if I am concerned about the edge of my table if I've got a softwood say like a pine or something like that I can open up the and this really helps to in terms of grip what I have on one side here I just have a saw cut on one side I cut these on the bandsaw so I make these to the right width like this and then I anchor this in here this really anchors it very nicely and if it's sticking up above like this one is sticking slightly proud I can just take my plane and plane this down to surface like this so now that's down it's not in my way I can take my scraper and not worry about damaging the edges of my workpiece it's got a nice solid feel about it again very side even though this is all the way up here it feels very side here when I'm scraping down here I don't really feel any issue and always remember you know you see a little bit of movement in here you see movement no matter what dogging system you've got it doesn't mean that a dogging system that specifically designed doesn't mean that they don't move they do move so all doggin systems move so this system is no different but you can see now we've got very good system using an existing clamp we don't even have to have this clamp dedicated to this bench you can this is just a regular sized clamp that you would need in any joiners workshop in any woodworkers workshop so it works very effectively now if you've got solid wood material like this one here and you need to clamp you've got this exactly the same there is no difference and what you have in this is you have the ability to go across your workbench again which works great let's say I wanted to hog off a lot of stock on this this is a lamination that I've done and I I'm going to make a bench top or something like that I might look at another plane this is just a regular smoothing plane and this will work just fine so I can plane with the grain like this or I could go across the grain which I often do is with a scrub plane for instance so I'm putting a lots of pressure on this piece of wood and it's nice and secure it's not moving it's not moving at all but I can clamp this as much sunlight but put the little shims in their little Packers if you feel you might be damaging the edge of your workpiece so that's that now if I want to plane with the grain I would just turn this around this way so I have a very nice anchor on my bench top that gives the real solidity over here and again anchor it down put your spacer in I didn't have my spacer in that time so I'm putting my spacer in just to stop any flex and now I can plane this way i feel total confidence so you can see how this works it works so nicely so I'm not sure why I would adopt another method if this one's working so well it's very inexpensive it's very effective and I like it I've got frames here let's look at this let's say you wanted a frame you've got a frame that you need to work on just a little bit again put these spaces in on oak I wouldn't bother but just clamp it up and you can scrape your surfaces here that works fine you could take this and you could plane it - you can plane the surface you nicely like that so that works that's on oak you can see how this how effective this is there you could if you wanted to you could put this on here as well and you could work on these mortise holes here if you needed to start chiseling out cleaning up your mortise holes you've got your work piece anchored to the bench top it works for other aspects not just planning and scraping it can work for sawing that one is nice what about bigger pieces say what about this one here say this is going to need some extra fettling so shims again if you've already got this piece finished and you wanted to shim this out you could do that just shim it and that will keep it nice and tight and then you can plane along the line here like this you could also go across your workbench again so this makes your workbench become very very versatile so across here bring in your your jaw a little bit of a shim in here this just quickens up the process so you don't even need to use these just to cushion your work but you can also use it to to fill in the gap just to speed up the process so here again now I can work on this edge get this going here so I can fix things after I finish my project so that works perfectly for 90 percent of your clamping needs I think you could probably say 95% of your clamping could be done with this with this clamp in the vise system lost my piece of wood so this little thing just goes over here this is the same distance as this gap here a lot of times people have asked me why why I have this protruding past the edge of the bend why don't I have this flush so I can clamp to the aid to the aprint to the tabletop to the bed stop I haven't found that of any real value at all ever in 50 years I have no reason for it hasn't worked for me I don't need it and the main reason I like what I have here is because I can take a piece of wood this is so simple it makes so much sense I can put my hand here I can keep a grip on my over hand here I can grip anything into the vise without trapping my fingers otherwise I have to come from this side or from underneath I can't come from underneath because my fingers will get pinched so I only have this front grip if I've got a heavier piece of wood say something like this let's say this gets to ten inches wide how am I going to get this in the vise my hand is not big enough to get it this way so now I can already feel the strain on my hand because I only have this one grip available to me so when I want to go low in the vise say like this I can't do it so this is the way I would go and it works perfectly you can see it's so quick now I want you to understand this and I probably would like you to adopt this away from the apron situation for the vise jaw but that's going to be up to you I'm just presenting this as an alternative this is very typical on all joiners workbench the English work benches were made this way not flush as people have lead you to think now sometimes we may mistake this quick release vise for a stem vise or for a different type of vise the old fashioned vise where the whole of the bench top was the second jaw and this was a free jaw that went on a couple of pinions and we rotated a wheel here and we anchored our piece in the vise that's a totally different type of vise it's not the same vise as this quick release vise which really is the universal vise now this is probably the most common vise used universally throughout the world I would say all right so let's say I think we've already established this is a very long piece of wood you've got the same situation the problem here when you see this is if I put this anchor this in the vise here I want to do this the vise the jaws of the clamp won't close up on this piece so what I would do in this situation is I would go outboard and I would get this close to where I want it set like that and I would just anchor this in the vise here just very loosely just to start because I want to move it bring my workpiece over here and then drop this to where it's below the bench below the jaws a bit of the clump or below the piece of wood and then I just anchor this again I'd use the shims on the side here especially on pine I would use shims on here but now this is ready so I have this hole and I can plane here that's a lot of pressure I'm taking off a very thick heavy shaving so you can see it's not moving very much if I want to I can take this outboard one and I can drop my piece of wood right on here bring my board back in and re clamp it and that will eliminate the kind of movement that I was talking about there so there you have it it gives me total access to the whole piece I can go down the whole piece like this when I get to this point when I've out reached myself I move this up another stage and bring this up to the vise here and I go the next leg like this across the whole piece so I can work down the whole length and I can turn it around and work from the other end now if I want to so you can see how effective that would be this is a very very basic method for working with your wood now that we've got a tail vise on here on this end of the bench we have a tail vise here so I can use this with the same method I can bring this here put this in the vise here and I can drop us a piece of wood into my vise just like this so for those who really do want to anchor something in the vise you can do this you could use this method here drop this down cinch it tight and then tighten this up here bring this up to whatever height you want here like this and this is dead solid it's not going to move at all it's perfect so now I can take my shaving this is a piece of oak rugged grain there you can see this holds it dead solid even though I've got a gap in here I don't have a space I have no clamp to clamp it on so you can see how effective this is for securing the material so that works really well too let's take this out so we'll be covering more on this tail vise soon just to show you here's another situation that you might find yourself in a long piece of fancier wood you set this again in your tail vise and into here running out of space a little bit here but this gets me solid very very solid so I'm solid here solid in the vise dead solid I've got the whole weight of my bed anchoring this piece of wood so I can go along here clean up the surface of my door style off my window style and even go beyond here and surface plane this this is very nice this really works well you can see the value in this type of a system so this is really what I wanted to introduce you to so you could evaluate for yourself what about something like this this is so awkward shaped this is hard to get this in the vise this is a piece of you that I'll be working some time in the future into a piece of furniture this is another one where I would you know you can experiment with different pieces that you want to work with but this this might be awkward to dog it might not be I'm not saying it is particularly awkward but I anchor this this way just that take up there my distance piece in the end here just to stop it moving and now I can scrape very solidly using the cabinet scraper get into the heart of the wood I could plane this quite easily I can work from this end here like this it works so effectively then I can move this down I could move this further along the vise to here relocate pop this in I get it near to my vise so I get good solidity here again and I can work down the whole piece that way so if it's an awkward shape like this one obviously is and and I might want to again go across my vise here if my if it fits which this one will I can find a hollow in there clamp this at the widest point so I get this in the vise like this make sure I'm just below the surface anchor this this cinch it up tight little spacer if I need it which I want because I'm so near to the bench that vise itself so I can clamp this on even on the wainy edge here and this is so solid I don't have any resistance it's not moving I feel confident and that's what I need to feel I'm taking these strokes with confidence and I see I'm showing you just how this would work with just about any type of piece of wood any length of material you have almost any width if you clump is 10 feet wide you can clamp this if it's 10 feet wide you could clump a table top in the hole of it so that will give you a little bit what about something I just remember seeing this earlier if you want to clump something that's even awkward like this you could clump this you can bring it up to maximize the depth in the in the jaws of the clamp here and you can even chalk this side you could even take something extend it this way chalk it here and then just plane away like this alright so that's nice I love it sometimes you've got these more awkward pieces that you want to work with and let's say you wanted to plow this this would be difficult to plow drop this in here often they're right out of reach for you so you can drop this in here cinch it tight so this is where I've got this small plow plane it might also be but I just want to plane this edge but what happens when I come to a plow plane like this I want to plow it the fence always gets in the way the vise gets in the way of the fence on here so here this will show you just the versatility of this particular addition so you can see how effective that is even more difficult than that so often is getting this in this edge if you're making say a draw side and you want to plow it again you can adjust this get this even above you can come pretty high up and get this out of the way you can come on the out board again which I'm doing here and you can set your plane and then cinch it tight wherever it is you see this is going to catch on this jaw here catches on this jaw so I need to go lower in my vise just to go below the stem of the plough plane cinch this up here cinch this here keep it nice and tight and you can see now I'm on the outboard so I've got my groove going in there unhindered and this works so nicely so these are just alternatives for you to think through this works whether you've got bench dogs or not if you want bench dogs go ahead and bore the holes and put your bench dogs in I'm not at all saying you shouldn't have I'm just saying that straight off the bat new woodworker you want to get going this clamp in the vise method will work for you and you can adapt it it's very versatile and this is what I want you to understand this is just to get you going you can add whatever concept to this you want it's an alternative and it works you

Channel: Paul Sellers

Views: 370,259

Rating: 4.9294119 out of 5

Keywords: Woodworking, Hand Tools, Clamping, Holding, Dogging, Vice

Id: SozekTvPpJM

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2016