Installed Wagon Vice and Turned Benchdogs

September 3rd, 2017 - Installed the Wagon vice and turned a set of bench dogs

I've done a lot of work in my shop the last two months. I just haven't had the time to post about it. Because of that, I'm going to summarize. I also didn't get pictures of a lot of this.

So I installed the Benchcrafted wagon vice hardware, and shaped the vice block from a piece of hard maple. ( A piece of 12/4 left over from my hall table project way back in 2005 or something.) I got the vice mounted cleanly and shimmed so the screw and vice block turn easily all the way from one end of the slot to the other. That took a couple of days of fiddling to get right.

Then I went in and drill dog  holes in my bench top. Two rows of 3/4" diameter holes down the length of the bench. I picked 3/4" because I assumed that was the standard. Every bench dog fixture from Veritas, and every available holdfast on the market is 3/4", so no big whoop picking that size, right? No, of course not. I now find out that The Schwartz has come in and decided to screw up one of the only universally accepted standards in the hand tool woodworking world. (I only found out about his new company, Crucible, and their 1" diameter holdfast a few days. I think I want to write my take on his justification 'rant' in a separate article.

Up next, I squared up a length of that very same 12/4" hard maple, pulled out and dusted off my trusty Harbor Freight lathe, and turned some wooden bench dogs. That was fun. 

I cut a 1" hole in the wagon vice block so I  would have a differentiated dog just for that location.  Oh, and this was also my first opportunity to use the Starrett calipers I bought over two years ago. With all the moving, I haven't had one single opportunity to turn anything before this.  So yes, I turned some bench dogs. It was a bit tricky to get the tops square and the shafts perfectly sized. I knocked the corners off a couple of them due to rustiness and lack of overall skill with the turnings and the bobbings and the shushings.  

I ended up with one 1" diameter dog for the wagon vice block, and five 3/4" diameter (roughly :-) )  dogs for the rest of the bench. Then I promptly used them to clamp the board I planned to use for my face vice chop and set to work on planing. Which quickly came to screaching halt. But that's another story.

So . . . I actually have a vice on this bench that I can actually use. I've even planed shit on it and stuff. Whoo hoo!!  Almost done. All I need to do to finish is install the shelf boards and the face vice. What could go wrong there? (oh crap)

Oh, and by the way, looking at that last picture to the left, yes, I know, I need to lag-bolt the endblock of the benchtop to the rest of the bench top, or that vice is going to rip it off. I just haven't purchased the hardware yet.