Mike Siemsen, Workholding on Viseless Bench

hi I'm Mike Sampson Mike Simpson school of woodworking I recently hosted a video with lost art press called the naked woodworker in which we refurbished a bunch of used tools and we also built a Nicholson style workbench like this that had no vices and I'd like to go a little over workholding with you on this bench to show how you can use a bench with no vices and not have a lot of problems with that it's actually pretty simple the key to work holding on a bench like this is the hold fast I happen to have an original hold fast here from the early days of woodworking and you can see that holds pretty well they also have the original mallet to go with it came as a set you'll find that the metal ones work a little better they're a little more efficient here's a blacksmith made one here's one that you can get from Gramercy tools tools for working wood they are very efficient at holding you need this and you will also need a mallet to strike them with the key things that you'll want to do at your workbench are flatten the faces of boards clean the edges of boards clean the end grain and cut some joints like dovetails and mortise and Tenon's so we're going to go over the work holding for all that and also cover a little bit on planing with fence planes and possibly making moldings so let's get started we're going to grab a board you two here and we're going to do some edge planing and one thing to keep in mind is that a bench isn't a there isn't a standard sized bench the height of the bench depends on the woodworker and the length of the bench depends a lot on the size of stock that you're going to work so this material here will easily fit on this bench but if I had a seven or eight foot board it would be too long and it wouldn't fit the bench and then I would need a larger bench like the one in the background that is able to hold bigger pieces of material so the scale of your work affects the scale of your bench the bigger your work the bigger your bench the first thing we're going to do here is we're going to plane the edge of this board and all we have to do is stick it in here we can use a holdfast if we want you don't always need to but it gives you a little bit more solid workholding and then we would grab our plane and just plane off that edge and you can plain stock all the way down to here like this wide so you could put a door in here a cabinet door there's a lot of options that you could use this stops being efficient when the piece that you're planing becomes too narrow so like this piece here will still work in here and I'll be able to plane the edge of this without too much trouble but you want to be watchful that the piece that you're planing doesn't flex here I'm going to grab a narrower piece and you'll see that this piece would flex underneath the load of the plane so you wouldn't necessarily get it straight so to plane a thinner piece of stock you would push up a planing stop here and then you could clean here and the bench is now supporting the stock rather than it just being supported by two pins so the flatness and straightness of your bench top helps you you may find that your if you're if the piece of wood you're planing has a bow in it this way or the other way a crown that you could put a shim under here to keep it from bowing away from you so you can support it better as you're planing and the same would be true if you were planing flat stock so you can see that it's not too difficult to plane the edges of boards of varying widths and lengths if this was a shorter piece I could move closer up to here you can see now here I wouldn't reach my hole so that could be a dilemma but what I can do is put another piece under here like that see now it's longer I can still use my holdfast if I want to to clamp it and clean the edge of that piece I guess that won't even grips and we'll just plane it I'm using a different thickness of stick like this also can help you adjust the height of this especially when you get up to these thinner sections so you might find that using a 3/4 or 1 inch stick might be useful there is a stick running up the middle of the bench and I tend to use it for that is to take this stick out of the center and I can lay that on top of there like that and get 3/4 of an inch or I can stand it up like this and I've saw on that saw to an inch and a quarter so it raises me up just a little bit higher to adjust the height of the board that I'm using on the side of the bench okay now we're going to be talking about flattening stock and it's a very important at the top of your bench be flat and we're going to be using planing stops here on the end of the bench you can see one here has been taken out I buried these in though in the end of the bench this is a small bench I've made some kind of light weight stops here you can get a feel for what they look like and this is a much heavier stop here that came off the longer bigger bench and this is made from just a large piece of angle iron that I saw it off and filed it made some teeth in it and you can make most of these things yourself but they also are available I believe out in the world or you could have a blacksmith make that for you and these are just buried into the bench top so they're flush so we want to flatten boards on our bench so what's how do you do that without a vise well we do have this stick up the center of our bench which allows us to put a board up against it like that we bring up our planing stop push our board up against it and then we're readily able to plane off the face of the board we're able to plane in the same direction as the board and it lays there and behaves itself if we have wider stock what do we do well board this width you could probably do it the same way that we just did with this board here I'd probably use this stop shove that up against there and plane this off but I could also use a device called a dough's foot to hold this or I could also clamp my stick way back here if I had a wider board yet I could clamp this stick back against my holdfast and I'll get a holdfast out here so I could lay this stick that's in the center of the bench there and I could clean up against those here you have to be careful that you don't hit the the iron part of the holdfast so you could get you want that out of your way but you can also use what's called the doze foot and the doze foot is basically a baton I have two of them here it's of just a baton with a notch in it and I make them about the width of my bench because there's times when I'll put it in a position like right here and put it up against two of these stops and I may want to plain against that for some reason but I'm going to use them to hold this this board here to plain I'm going to bring up my stop here and I'm going to shove my board up against it give it a good bump and then I'm going to take my not board here and put it on my bench and I'm going to lock that in place with my holdfast and now I can clean that off quite readily and I can also clean in the direction of the material like this and it holds it pretty solidly from moving you will find that when you plane with these planes and using these kind of stops where the boards are loose you get a little information back from your lumber so if you pull backwards and here I'm caught pretty well but if I was planing up just against the stick like this I would find that when I the question is do you raise your plane up when you pull it backwards and if you didn't it would pull the board out away from there so these questions get answered automatically nobody because the boards are loose so when you plane you're going to have to take some of the load off the plane when you back up or it's going to pull the board back with it and so you get that information right off the bat another thing you'll find is if you're planing a board in this position is switch planes that one's a little heavy you'll find that when you plane a board in this position that it's balanced there if I plane too hard on one side or something it wants to tip over and if I don't keep pressure on the back of the plane when I leave the board jumps up like this and so that shows me that I'm actually not planing correctly if I get a jumping up like that I'm not cleaning holding my plane correctly and so it's jumping up out of there see but if I'm using my plane correctly it'll stay flat so you get some information back from your material when it's loose on the bench like this another method of using your battens would be to hold like here I can I'm going to do a really wide board now with this stick not the batten and I want to clean off this crud and this board is so wide see I can't get at any of my holdfast holes or anything there but I can take this stick out of the middle and I can walk back here and now I'm gonna hold this stick up here I've got a holdfast hole here in the back of the bench and that gives me a planing stop now the full width of my bench so that I can plane off a big board like this one you can see that's a little springy so maybe I'd want my holdfast closer to home here there's another hole here and that would take care of that keep in mind if you have shavings on your bench and you're sweeping it with your hand don't sweep them this way sweep them across this way and then you won't get splinters from your bench it's much more pleasant that way and also watch out for those hold those planing stops because they can grab YouTube so now I'm going to set up a board here and I'm going to plow a groove in it with with a plow plane so now I want to grab my my battens I'm gonna use them as battens now rather than is those feet I'm going to push that up against the cleaning stop here grab a hold fast you can see I can adjust the width anywhere along here that I want and I want it to be that wide so this board is not just loose here but I have enough room here that my fenced plane is hanging off the end of the bench so that won't interfere and I can just plane a rule very readily in the face of this board if I wanted to paint a groove in the edge of the board then I would go back to using it in this manner and again then you can all right here we are we're going to be cutting a tenon on the end of a board and then we're also going to be cutting a mortise one of the things is how do you hold wood of various widths to cut a tenon on the end so I have some sample boards here the various widths and what we do is we put our piece of wood in here like this and you can angle it across so it hits both of these and then we can if it's tall run it up down to the floor but there you can see I've got this fastened pretty solidly to my bench and I can easily saw on here if I take my gage here I can gauge some nice lines I can take my tenon saw and I would saw down to my baseline just you can saw the corners out this way if you want you can saw right these two corners so I down to your baseline then turn the border out and saw these two corners down to your baseline and there you have your tenon saw I know now if you were sawn Tenon's of the board of various width this is a narrower piece if you had a wider piece this would still work it's pretty vertical that wouldn't be a problem but you could also move it here if you wanted to and angle it more or even back to here that's a little bit much but putting it here you could easily saw a tenon on that board and if you had a wider 1/2 saw you could then go still here or here if your board is shorter you might even end up coming up into here to grab it but you can see that you have options for holding different width to boards for cutting a tenon on now if you're going to chop a mortise in your piece we would bring that up on the bench here we've got our scribe line nicely scribed on here and this is probably how you'd do it anyways but we're just going to use a holdfast again to clamp the board to the bench and then we would chop out our mortise so you get the general idea now we want to saw off these shoulders so how do we do that well we can use a bench hook which is a pretty standard device on a workbench and take our saw and sawed off our shoulder or we could bring this stick up again it's high enough on this material that we could saw through that way we could also just sawed off the end there and accomplish the same task so we're able to cut the shoulders of our Tenon's if you wanted to saw white board or rip a wide board we can do that as well if we were to wanting to saw the end off of a board like this we could again put it up against this planing stop here let's Center stick and we could grab our crosscut saw and pretty easily sawed off the end of a board I typically do these operations on sawhorses but it's easily accomplished on your workbench as well a wider board you could use similar manners of holding it with battens or things and enable yourself to do that if you wanted to rip this board we can just clamp it right to the bench top like this we're going to use two old fast that hold it down securely and we just we don't have a line on here but we can I can imagine one I'm just going to saw quarter-inch off the edge here so you can see it's not too difficult to rip here as well and now that we've got this thin stick how do you plane that well again we're going to go to our hold fast if we wanted to clean the edge of that up we would have to just grab it by the end here like that and that will hold it securely while we plane the face of it nope I'll say it again there's a knot here which is giving me a little trouble and that'll hold it securely so we can plane our stick thinner because you tried to plane the other way it would just break the stick then you have to turn it around clamp it again and then clean the other way and it allows you to plane the piece in tension now we're going to talk a little bit about planing in Grain here you can see I'm using a shooting board and I'm just planing it off that's a pretty standard method to doing this I'm actually just using the same bench hook that I use when I saw and then we're also going to show you how it is set up to saw dovetails so you saw you can shoot a thin board like this but if you wanted to plane the end of a larger board like on the order of this one we could accomplish that by putting it here in our crochet that's what this stick here is or a Crockett or crotch or whatever rook could stick whatever you want to call it so we're going to clamp this board to the bench like this and we're going to just plane it now in this case I could probably walk around and plane back but you can't always it's always good cleaning up against your stop so we're just going to turn it around and plane back from the other way and you really don't want to plane off the end anyways so you get the general idea now we're going to set up for dovetailing I mean hanging on the end here I have just a block of wood here it has a hole in it so I can hang it just the face is flat and I'm going to use it like a vise I'm just going to mount it on my bench here like that just sits on these dolls and then I'm going to put my holdfast in here so I can clamp it up let me grab my other hold fast for this end and I have some scrap stock here that's the same thickness as the material I'm going to be dovetailing and I'm just going to put that scrap right in at this peg here this doll and I'm going to put my holdfast against there and I want to crowd my holdfast to the front side of that and clamp it and now this board is held fast in there but I can still get my piece in and out and then use this one to clamp it up so then we would just mark our gauge line here on our piece to be dovetailed put it in our chopped here I can grab my saw and I can saw my dog tails here's my half panel and I can cut my tails see it easily holds what I want to do to saw dovetail I can saw them different widths whatever you want to do it's nothing too tricky and then I can chop my waist now when you're chopping your dovetail waist you're holdfasts come in handy as well because now I can hold fast my material to my bench and I can even stack by boards I could stack on three four five high whatever it takes here to dovetail when I want to chop out my waist this is the wrong size chisel but I will just pull ahead so you get the idea that you can easily clamp and hold work for dovetailing you can also clamp pieces in here and clean the ingrain if they're not too big but you do have a form of a vise here that's just dependent on hold fast and a chop if you want to take it a little farther you can make a twin screw vise like this which is a loose vise that you can sit on top of your bench use your hold fast to clamp it to the bench top and use that as a vise as well for dovetailing but now you have a vise on your bench and we're not talking about vices where woodworking anymore I want you to know I don't have anything against vices on benches this just happens to be a way to work without a vise I have plenty of Isis and other benches in my shop and I use them regularly but I find this is a very interesting method of working it also gives you some feedback as you're working and it is I like to encourage people get started in woodworking without spending all their money you know and have a little a few dollars left you know buy their favorite malt beverage if you are interested and haven't seen it already I do have like I said a video with lost art press The Naked woodworker I've also made a video with craftsy craftsy.com called woodworking essentials benches and boxes by Mike Simpson and in there we make benches and boxes it's pretty basic and I would think that I want to thank you for paying attention thus far and I want you to know that this has been a public service announcement brought to you by the makers of no vice at all you

Channel: Mike Siemsen

Views: 424,409

Rating: 4.9409685 out of 5

Keywords: Nicholson, workbench, viseless, woodworking, Siemsen, Mike Siemsen, holdfast, Lost Art Press, Naked Woodworker

Id: yvhn-PAfEW4

Length: 31min 40sec (1900 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 03 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/jayefuu]

Now I really want some holdfasts.

[u/joelav]

I've been using mine for almost a year. I do have another bench with a vise, but I only use it when shaping/rasping small stuff like plane totes. A planing stop is so effective and simple I wonder why anyone bothers with a tail or wagon vise.

[u/number_e1even]

I should be wrapping up my version of the Nicholson bench based on this video, but I will admit, even though I'm not a fan of my vice on my old bench, I'm pulling it off and mounting it as an end vice on the new bench.

[u/DesolationRobot]

A question for those of you who do this: what about accessories: where do you keep them? Holdfasts, bench dogs, battens, bench hooks. Seems like you have a lot of things that need storing somewhere. I'm prone to losing small items.

Nice thing about a vice: it's self-storing.

[u/Starving_Poet]

I don't know what I do differently, but I've never had luck with a doe's foot.