Thread: movable benchdog

I'm not too sure if this is the right place for this post, and I'm a bit embarrassed making it. But anyway...

After making a cutting board out of some redgum post and old hardwood housing timber, I had to hold the wood down for planing with scraps of mdf screwed into an old, filthy, oily, scratchy benchtop, I wanted to upgrade before my next projects.

In my garage, the bench is attached to the rear and side walls and is an old (40 years or more) door, with accumulated decades of grime - on both sides. It is held up with angle iron and when I turned it over, it was just as bad on the other side. So I covered it with 16mm MDF.

Then, to save the money I don't have (and because I'm a lefty and I put my vice towards the righthand end of the bench, rather than on the end where I could have used it instead) I came up with a cunning plan to create a poor man's movable benchdog, using a quick-action clamp.

This is my effort - I've embedded a 250mm clamp bar with the pistol grip head on it inside the bench (drill and chisel to create the slots, and jigsaw to make the space for the head to fit in) giving me 145mm of movement. Then I've drilled 25mm holes through the bench and put dowel dogs into them. The piece of wood shown clamped in the picture below was the closest piece I could grab, but I've tried it with part of a redgum post, and it holds well when planing. I can hold any length between 15cm - 1.5m with it (in theory - the longest length I've tried is about 70cm). It sticks up 11mm without the yellow cover, and a bit more with (about 17mm from memory). That should be okay, provided I don't want to plane thinner pieces than that (but I figure I'll put a thinner waste piece in between if I do).

What do you guys think? If breaks, I figure I can re-cover the hole with some more MDF and go back to the drawing board. What else should I (could I) do?

Thanks for looking, Mike