Roy Underhill's Bench Hooks

well now that's a nice router you know using that router makes me have a hankerin for some chowder and I was thinking you know the only way I'm gonna catch me a haddock is if I had had me a hook and so I got to thinking of the old bench hook I I did and I'm Roy Underhill and I'm at the Lee Nielsen Tool Works and we were thinking about bench hooks the other day so we're gonna take a look at this style of bench hook now the one you probably know is this style it's much broader this l-shaped plank here and it's brilliant you can sit here or stand up and put your hand against it there and start a tenon cut you can play you can do the ends you can do all kinds of work with the wonderful bench hook so here I'll just kind of zip out the grain to make a little tenon on the end little rabbit there we are zip zip-zip adiy do all right so this works great that holds the wood but I think it doesn't look much like a hook it looks see and what's the thing why is it called a bench hook well this is perhaps an older style this does look like a hook in fact it hooks one on the other you can just hook them together that just go up forever so this is a different style of bench hook that you can use in the same way put them up against the bench here and we can slide into it again we can saw we can do all that wonderful work that we do with the other kind of bench hook but this will also let you work with long long pieces so this is great separate these and work with a long piece we can get down here and work and a piece you know six 12 feet long does it matter they'll come apart and we've been working on down just like that all right that's great but wait there's more we noticed that we didn't have we were going to do a whole lot of mortising and that we did not have the benches yet board for holdfasts so this is of course the other use for these kind of bench hooks set them in the front face vise set it right over the wood grab it up and then hit it here and it holds the wood down like a holdfast so here we are it's held now and we can do our mortising lickety-split so you'll start in and just work along shopping that mortise with the wood held steady and still using the front vise and our bench hook held thusly all right so let's go ahead and make one so the heavy wood dense wood something really strong two and a half inches broad inch and a half thick and perhaps a foot long and here I've got one all right so here we exactly that inch and a half thick two and a half broad foot long we're going to come in two inches on each end to do the hook and I've got one side laid out here ah here it is alright so well go ahead and take two inches in from one side and find that point and let's go two and a half inches in on the other side find that point all right and then we'll come down say 3/4 of the way on this line and then again 3/4 of the way on this line now we're only going to use half the thickness of the wood when we get to it but there you go so we don't go all the way across because we don't so we don't get confused which is real easy to do now I'm going to come down half the thickness of the wood and the way I find it of course is set this gauge with the two to what looks like half come in from one side then come in from the other side in the middle of those two very close lines is where I want to go for the center here we are again half in from one side half in from the other side and that's our center point so now we're going to draw the long line and I've got a long stick here handily I've got to check and make sure it go inside with the side I've already drawn I go from that halfway point two inches from one end and draw all the way to the corner up here so you draw all the way from this point to this point now this one's going to go from here to here and that's what's going to make that zig it also adds another feature because we went at 90 degrees when we did this first line here this first line was at 90 degrees a right angle to the surface now we've dropped the intersecting line down this way that makes this kind of a hook this angle in here is one or two degrees tighter than 90 degrees so it really does hook into the wood all right that's easy now I guess if we've got all that done I'm going to square across the face and you can see here on the other side I've got the same design laid out and now we've got to get rid of all that wood so how would you do that we can take a rip saw and rip down the length of it now that's ripping through two and a half inches of maple and that's fine it's alright but you can also do it with a lot of cross cuts so I'm going to set this up here for just that technique so obviously I don't have much save we're going to rip down to the end the only thing I would say is well you probably do want to do this stop cut first it would be bad if you split this end off by twisting the rip saw as you're working but instead what I'm going to do is do a whole bunch of cross cuts here I'm going to turn it the other way though you turn it like this all right and starts a bunch of crosscut so I'll start with the one down here there we are get in that front voice and right across and square down from the surface but it won't be square when we finish putting the ramp onto it so do this one very carefully watching to stop when I get to the line as in most things it's not a sawing that's important as is the stopping song so here we go so work along this is some very clear hard maple white oak would be real good beech very dense wood if however you have wood with knots in it fear not because what you need to do in that case is simply make sure you cut right on the knot so the more you can cut that knot into little pieces the easier it'll go all right so I've got a bunch more of these to do so here we go you're it's as fun as it looks alright alright that's all the Crosscut's now we're gonna go down the grain just splitting all these chunks away hmm so start at the end right on down all right so get over on this side see I've got the bevel down so they're just splitting out all the way down it won't be careful on that last cut be careful on the last cut not to knock the end off it so that worked pretty well down one side of work the other side and then come down the middle again having the bevel down against the wood makes for better control better control this is probably a good time to mention the one secret the one secret that will guarantee your woodworking is flawless and it's good as it can possibly be and it's simply this and that will make it just right every time so you got that now of course if you're also very careful to always will come out just right so there we are all right so that's down with all roughed out we've still got our depth line so now this comes a little more tedious want to put our bevel down and start working let's see if I can do a little bit of bevel down work here yeah so just tuning this up now and I've seen folks work standing this on the side and splitting down the side of the grain I just got to watch the grain and see what's happening here in fact at the start of the layout it'd be really good to watch your grain and make sure that you're not going to be going against the grain on these ramps by some choice that could have been made easily the other way now I'm going to come down with the edge of the chisel and just bring down to the final line so then I know there you go I've got a kind of a depth guide on both sides and I don't have to see but I can feel because I've got the chisel going all the way to the line yeah there we go all right so now this is a good point to go to the plane I'm gonna see if we have a do we have any planes here do we have any planes ah okay here's a plane I've got a nice number four and I'll work this down up here but of course this can't get all the way down to the end we can't go all the way up to that shoulder Nords we want to hit this shoulder and knock the hook off the end of our bench hook and we would have a hookless bench hook so this is working fine bringing this end down very much I cut a little too deep alright now this bottom in look at this you can do this with a paring chisel holding it flat on the wood and letting the paring chisel the paring shuttles so thin that you can slide it on the wood and just sheer down maybe get yourself a little bit of diagonal action going alright this takes a little while to get this cleared away this is using a chisel pushing along now wouldn't be nice if there was such a thing as a chisel plane something that would hold the chisel at just the right incline that it could come right up to that to that shoulder wouldn't that be nice whether it's such a thing I've never used one before but here it is it's a a a chisel plane so it's got the iron sitting way out front and working along with a very fine cut we can smooth right up to the little hook shoulder there because this has nothing in front of the iron just work right along on the diagonal all right well this is gonna take a little bit here so I'm gonna fiddle with this until I can get it smooth so here we go all right now so I'm finishing up here I'll get a scraper action main thing is that this thing is level enough that your wood on it it's not going to be rocking about because the whole point is that this holds it flat and steady on the bench all right there we go now so that's it except for one very important thing remember this other use we have for these bench hooks is to hold for mortising and that strike that we do puts a lot of strain on that little two inches of Grainne that could shear so we have this end beveled off so that when we strike it down we're not going to run a crack right down there so that's the final thing we've got to employ that lost art of pairing pairing hence we have our parry chisel and here we are Amerigo so I'm going to round off this square end starting with my dividers I've got a pair of dividers like you know how a cutting gauge is different than a regular gauge a common gauge well this is a cutting compass accompany cutting dividers they one are sharp on one leg like a knife and you can see how that just cuts right into the grain so I've got a really nice start for the round ASSA t here on that side do the other side and then we'll run some lines across and then we'll be ready for the paring so this kind of compass with the cutting foot really helps out and doing a little arc like this or big arc like when you're doing arch top panels or something like that so I will run a guard line across the face and there's one guideline on that face and then a guideline down in grain and just having something to look at when you know to know when to stop so there we are now paring this is a paring chisel so so thin it also oddly you use it in the most crude manner you're using it like ah you know a tube root a kind of thing so a stabbing motion but you don't stab with it you push with your chest so this is held against your chest the other end of the business end you hold between your two fingers like that with the other fingers resting on the wood so you see how those can steer and this has a huge amount of force coming down it's kind of like one of those old mortising machines foot lever that simply pushed the chisels straight down in a controlled cut so here we go with a sheer across the grain so this is cross grain paring kind of a lost technique you don't see people doing this as much as they used to but then again people don't make bench hooks as much as they used to and that's why that's why we're all special right all right so I'll finish this up paring down paring across the grain we can then go after this with the block plane smooth it up as much as we want but you know you can do whatever you want put holes in it to hang it up here's the final thing though just to reminder how these bench hooks work you can take them on the bench and work with small stock like that you can even work in the middle between these two and what really pays off is you can take a long Tim burl Ike this one now this is only a short one but one day last week up here in Maine at the Lee Nielson tool works well the fog rolled in and I was working on the six foot long bench I was and I noticed though with my 12 foot timber I was able to keep on playing in the full 12 feet well-supported turns out at the end I had been playing in 6 feet out on top of the fog so thanks a lot I'm Roy Underhill so long you

Channel: Lie-Nielsen Toolworks

Views: 769,729

Rating: 4.8461738 out of 5

Keywords: Underhill, YouTube

Id: Th6Cu0sqhjs

Length: 17min 57sec (1077 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/mostly_partly]

James Brown called himself 'The Hardest Working Man In Show Business', but he had nothing on Roy Underhill. At the end of every 'Woodwright's Shop' show (usually filmed in a single session) he'd be drenched in sweat and exhausted!

[u/MtnManMike]

Nothing beats his sweet goofy sense of humor paired with his skill and hat.

[u/magicfap]

Are you sure it wasn't Have the right tool for the job

[u/vwtrey]

I'm going to go use these new tips right now..

[u/Jewishjay]

Short list of men who's deaths I will someday have to mourn:

1. Roy Underhill

2. Neil Young

3. Dan Erlewine

end list

[u/Clock_Man]

......Thanks Roy? Always the advice we need. lol.

[u/Jewishjay]

Been watching Woodwright's Shop on WUNC since I was kid.

[u/YtseDude]

prefect

That is delicious.

[u/lol_admins_are_dumb]

LOL