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Anyone here using a fancy traditional woodworking bench with dog holes and the end vices and such? And do you find yourself using these features?

A friend gave me one of those benches almost a couple of decades ago knowing I would never buy one for myself. Knowing what I know now, I would buy one for myself. I use the end vises all of the time for many different things. The bench dogs see very infrequent use, but I do put clamps in the holes to hold my shooting board in place. He bought me the bench after he was there while I was jointing on my old bench. As I planed, the bench walked across the floor. When I was done, I put it back where it belonged. This bench doesn’t move. The only modification I had to make was to put it up on blocks—from the factory, the work surface was just too low.

Mine is not a wholly traditional woodworking bench that weighs several hundred pounds, with drawers, etc., but it does have dog holes and an end vise, and I use them both:



30" wide, 60" long, store-bought laminated maple benchtop bolted to those cast iron bench legs that Lee Valley used to sell a long time ago. A Veritas twin screw vise (they still sell those) is mounted on one end. Dog holes are in a regular pattern around all four edges, and up the middle.

For guitar building, the dog holes mostly get used as mounting holes for other vises or special jigs/fixtures that are temporarily bolted to the bench. When I am working on sheet goods, the dog holes are where I whack down holdfasts to keep the sheet goods from scooting around.

I can set up temporary clamping gizmos using the dog holes and some Veritas Wonder Dogs. Or, just wedges and bench dogs.

I have never regretted setting up this bench in this way. It's been one of my better decisions when it comes to my shop.

Nice! I have a feeling also that one tends to adapt around what one has…

I built my own based on a plan in Fine Woodworking by Tage Frid. Had to build it in stages. Besides the the front vice and end vice, I have a 'parrot' vice and a luthier/gun-makers vice each bolted down on it's own 2"x10" that i can clamp down fast and easy. The nice thing with the bench-dogs is that I can use several jigs and change them fast and easy. I can bolt work boards to extend out from the bench so I can work from many different directions.

When I first started I did use a traditional bench but after taking the Charles Fox course in 2004 switched to his design of an island of particle board boxes bolted together in the pattern desired with adjustable carriage bolt/t-nut levelers and topped with a layer of particle board and one of melamine.

Rock solid and you can drill holes wherever you need one to move various appliances about like vises.

Plenty of options for shelving, drawers, etc. Cheap kitchen base cabinets can also be similarly topped.

IMG_2102 by Terence Kennedy, on Flickr

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

I use a traditional bench all the time in my handtools room. I have another L shaped one in my garage with all my machines that I use a lot as well. I was going to build my own but it was made much easier when I found a 3" thick x 24" x 72" maple slab at LeeValley that was on sale for $200 as it had a tiny ding on one corner. They no longer carry slabs this thick. I made the legs etc. for it. I occasionally use the dog holes but mainly the end vise and Tucker vise which is extremely handy. Great for planing and it does not move.

A European joiner's bench is really designed for a handful of woodworking operations that constitute the bulk of traditional cabinetmaking. Little of what we do in terms of repair or build work aligns with those few operations. That said, I worked in a shop for years that was centered around a massive Scandinavian-style bench that made those bits of actual woodworking both comfortable and efficient. That bench was much larger than the Tage Frid design mentioned, capable of working 8' long stock along the length of the top and aggressive work on shorter stock such as plates done across the 38" wide shoulder vise area. My notes suggest that it is the Frank Klausz variant from Taunton Press' The Workbench Book, somewhat stretched, widened, and built to a 37" height to accommodate someone of over 6' height. Very pretty, large dovetails at the shoulder and in the tail vise, with the size of the timbers making those joints of practical strength for the intended purpose.

I also suspect that few small shops have enough available bench space for a full-sized joinery bench (8' x 3' with an additional 1.5'-2' to the right for a RH tail vise) and one or more purpose-built benches for repair and setup work, so it would seem to me that - committing the space and financial resources to a full-sized European-style cabinetmaker's bench is justified only where the bulk of the work done in the shop is outside of instrument build/repair work.

Other thoughts on benches:

- Woodworking benches are usually 3.5"-4" lower than more general-purpose benches to permit the sort of leverage needed for planing, scraping, and saw work for joinery.
- A long bench for instruments which seldom exceed 45" of length is nice for conducting multiple operations at the same time (e.g., fitting a dovetailed neck joint to a body, where there are three distinct operations conducted in a recurring pattern
- The repair operations I tended to perform on the joinery bench were: sawing things like dovetails and tenons, neck resets (the tail vise did a nice job holding the shoulder trimming jig, and the shoulder took a neck headstock-down to permit the cheeks to be trimmed and relieved), bridge pull and reglue, some brace work (the bench was really just a bit too tall for me, so often ended up on a 2" platform left by a previous, even shorter apprentice), and French Polishing.
- A repair bench (used for most guitar work after the neck goes on) needs to be about 3"-4" higher than wrist height off the shop floor and have a vise rising above the top to hold the neck during set-up or other common operations. Something closer to 5'-6' gets most guitars on the bench width with room to spare for tools or parts like tuners. A tool tray or similar on the far side of the bench is handy for all the things we use on a routine basis.
- Greenridge used a cantilevered platform off the repair bench end for the necessary vise on both repair benches and the finishing bench - handy for holding the neck while using a string winder or working the dovetail faces on a neck fit-up.
- A separate 62" long, 30" wide bench cantilevered out from one of the shop walls handled electronics duties with room for an elevated platform to hold bench-top voltmeter, soldering station, hot air rework station, and digital O-scope.

The message here should be that no bench does it all if you build as well as repair, or provide the sort of full-range repair work (e.g., complete rebuild/restoration) that some shops are known for providing.

My current bench in my cramped single-stall garage is the standard cheap Harbor Freight woodworking bench with additional bracing to provide some rigidity plus a cantilever vise add-on, and is definitely not up to the job. Once I get some time available from dealing with Federal and state budget cuts and impacts on the clinic, I will spend a week or two over in Maryland where the heavy shop machinery dwells. I will build something closer to the repair benches I used for too many years, and perhaps a shorter, smaller version of the Klausz bench as well (or reprogram some funds to purchase a custom, shorter-length, shoulder vise version of the Lie-Nielsen bench).

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A constellation only takes shape when one maps the whole.
- Beth Brower

Thanks! I def have room for a bench for each job, but a fella gets tired of the old MDF and 2x4 Cheap Classique Design. But what works works…