Tail Vice and Bench Dogs

When preparing a flat board it is usually necessary to secure the workpiece on a level bench and stop it sliding around.

A number of options are available:

Simplest is to clamp the board in a woodworker's vice. This is fine for small pieces but for wider and longer boards is no good. you can't use the downward pressure required especially in hardwoods. The board tends to slip in the vice, possibly resulting in damage to the piece.

Alternatively try making a panel board. My first use of one was in my beginners class at John McMahon's School of Fine Woodworking . It works really well for medium sized boards like the one pictured above. I'll get round to making one at some point. Keep your eyes out as for a future post.

I decided to add a tail vice with a pair of dogs.

My workbench is pretty ancient. It was already in the garage when we moved in to the house. Although pretty sturdy, made from 3 inch thick timber, it was very worn and uneven on the top. This was easily remedied with some 12mm ply and faced with an apron using old joists from an old internal wall we'd taken out.

Adding a tail vice of the type shown was pretty straightforward. It's a very cheap vice from screwfix, faced with an off-cut of beech I picked up at the local timber merchant for a couple of quid. I have since learned that the limited travel of the vice, once the jaws were fitted, creates significant limitations for the bench dog system. (see below)

The jaw is made from 2 pieces of beech with a pair of housing dados cut into them to create a square recess for the vice dogs. The dogs themselves were made exactly to the design seen in John McMahon's school.

The leaf spring allows the dog to maintain its position but slide up and down with ease.

In the workbench I created a row of holes for the rounded dogs made following a youtube video by Wranglerstar.

Unfortunately as mentioned earlier, the cheap vice only travels about 4 inches. I needed to make holes for the bench dogs on 3 to 4 inch centres at most. 

The system would also work better with 2 rows of holes aligned with the vice dogs. I guess you learn as you go!

You can see I've been using a Veritas low angle jack plane. See my review here