Entry 04 / Workholding / Workshop diary
Workholding: one vice, four dog holes and two holdfasts
The bench came with the house, more or less: a beech top on a pine frame, left behind by whoever had the outbuilding before me. It took two years to understand that a bench is a tool and not a piece of furniture.
The bench, and why I stopped adding to it
My first instinct was to improve it. I fitted a shelf underneath, a tool well along the back, a rack for chisels at the far end and a second small vice I used perhaps four times. Within a year the well was a tray of shavings and stray screws, the shelf was where things went to be forgotten, and the chisel rack meant the last four hundred millimetres of the top could not take a long board. All of it came off over one wet Sunday, and the bench was noticeably better for it.
What a bench has to do is stay still, stay flat, and let you hold work from any direction. Mass and friction handle the first part; my frame is bolted rather than glued, and a crate of offcuts on the bottom rail stops it walking across the floor when I plane. The rest is subtraction. A clear top means a long board can lie on it, a carcase can stand on it, and there is nowhere for a chisel to hide under a pile of shavings until I put my hand on it.
Flattening the top with a jointer plane
A beech top left to itself for thirty years is not flat, and until it is you cannot know whether a hollow in the work is in the work or in the bench. Winding sticks and a long straightedge showed mine dished about two millimetres in the middle and twisted along its length. Flattening took an afternoon with a jointer plane worked diagonally in both directions and then along, checking with the sticks every few passes and pencilling the high spots. The shavings filled two buckets and the plane wanted honing four times.
It has needed a light touch since then, once a year, usually in spring when the shop dries out and the top moves with it. Twenty minutes, a dozen passes, no ceremony. The gain is not theoretical. Assembling a frame on a flat top means the frame leaves the clamps without a twist in it, and checking a board against the bench only means something if the surface underneath is honest. I keep a diary note of when I last did it, because otherwise I would postpone it indefinitely.
Holdfasts do most of the work
Four dog holes and a pair of holdfasts hold more work, more quickly, than the vice does. A holdfast is a curved iron bar that drops into a hole in the top and grips by friction when you tap it, and it will hold a board down flat, hold a stop for planing against, or clamp a guide block along a baseline for paring. A tap with a mallet sets it and a tap from behind releases it, which is faster than any screw arrangement I own and leaves the whole surface of the work clear.
The holes want to go right through the top rather than part way into it, and they want a little roughness inside; mine grip better now than when they were fresh. I bored the first two in the wrong place, too far back from the front edge to reach while standing at the vice, and the third and fourth taught me to stand a board on the bench and mark where my hands actually go. Getting the holdfasts to grip at all took some fiddling with the angle of the hole and a rasp inside it.
- Bore the holes right through the top, not part way into it
- Mark the positions where your hands already rest, not on a drawing
- A slightly rough hole grips better than a clean one
- Tap the back of the shaft to release, not the top a second time
Holding a long board on your own
Working alone is the constraint that shapes most of my workholding. A two metre board being edge-jointed wants supporting at both ends, and I have neither a second pair of hands nor a long enough bench. What works is a plain wooden batten clamped to the front of the bench with two clamps, projecting far enough at each end to carry the board, with a stop at one end so the plane pushes the work against something solid instead of along the bench. It is ugly, and it takes four minutes to set up.
For anything wider than the vice I plane against a stop with the board held by a holdfast, which puts no clamping pressure anywhere near the surface I am trying to flatten. Clamps on the face of a board leave marks and sit in the way of the plane; a stop and a holdfast do neither. Most of my workholding problems dissolved when I stopped trying to grip the work tightly and started trying to stop it sliding. Those are different problems, and only one of them needs any force.