Hand Tool Basics Book Available For Order

Book cover, showing the plane till in my basement workshop.

If you'd like a copy of my book, Hand Tool Basics, published by Popular Woodworking Books, it's now available online at ShopWoodworking.com.

It's available in both hardcopy and e-book formats. It's a direct companion to my video series, Intro to Hand Tools (more information on the series, including the free Part 1 and sample lesson, is at Intro To Hand Tools Downloadable Videos).

Whether you want to augment your power tool woodworking with some hand skills or you want to do everything with hand tools, whether you have a big shop or just a tiny space, this is for you.

The images in the book are taken from the digital video I recorded for the series, and its organization and content match the series. The book is therefore a matching visual reference for hand tool woodworking, with some 1400 captioned photos.

Why have a book version identical to the video series? Several reasons:

• Some people prefer learning from videos. Some people prefer learning from books.
• It's nice to have both so you can sit back and watch the videos, then have the book with you on the workbench as you follow the steps for a procedure.
• The dynamic images in the video allow you to watch the tools in motion, while the static images in the book freeze the action so you can take your time examining details. These complementary views help you get the whole picture.

You can see my acknowledgements and references here. These are the people who gave me the knowledge.

Here are the full Contents and Index pages so you can see what's covered. As always, I like to show multiple ways of doing things, so you can tackle any situation based on the tools you have available, your personal preferences, and your current skill level.







Here are a few sample pages representative of the layout and level of detail in the book.


From Chapter 1: The Tools, showing a selection of the tools covered.


From Chapter 5: Mortise and Tenon Joinery, showing some of the fistfights and fundamentals.


From Chapter 6: Dovetail Joinery, showing some of the steps laying out and sawing a tails-first through-dovetail.

Feel free to email me at sdbranam@gmail.com if you have any questions about anything in the book. One of the challenges is getting just the right explanation that conveys the information to all readers regardless of their experience and skill level, and sometimes that fails.

Beyond The Vise

Using holdfasts to hold a piece of walnut for rabbetting the edge.

Workholding For Hand Tools

Why go beyond the vise? Most workbenches have some kind of vise for holding workpieces. A good vise is invaluable, but it's not the whole story. There are some operations or workpieces where it just doesn't work well. 

Things only get more frustrating if you don't have a good vise. Some are totally inadequate. And what do you do when working at a project site or some other remote location away from you main bench?

Woodworking is thousands of years old. Various workholding methods have been handed down across the generations, but many have faded into obscurity.

In my Popular Woodworking University webinar Beyond The Vise, November 5 at 8:30pm EST, I'll part the mists of time and show you how to use them in your work (a recorded version will be available if you're unable to be online at that time).

These are time-tested methods that are simple and efficient. Effective work holding makes your work faster and easier. And less frustrating.

One of my favorites is pictured above, the holdfast. This is an example of modern evolution of an ancient method. These Gramercy Tools holdfasts are made in a patented process from modern bridge wire ("wire" takes on new meaning when you're holding up something like the Golden Gate bridge). But blacksmiths have been making them for woodworkers for centuries.

The essence of simplicity, they just work. Slipped into vertical or horizontal dog holes, you whack them on the head to set, and whack them behind the head to release. You can hoist an entire workbench into the air with a holdfast set in the top.

The general requirement for work holding is that you need to be able to hold pieces for face, edge, and end grain work. This includes planing operations of all kinds, sawing, and chiseling, for stock preparation and joinery.

The tools apply force to the work in specific directions, so you need to restrain the workpieces against those forces. A plane directs force down the length of a board. Planing on a diagonal adds sideways force. You need to keep the work from sliding forward or sideways.

Some tools also apply force on the return stroke. A saw cuts on the forward stroke, but there's enough friction in the kerf that pulling it back on the return stroke pulls on the workpiece. So you need to restrain it against both forward and backward forces.

It's tempting to want to lock down the work against all possible motion, since that's what a vise does. The workpiece is restrained against movement in three dimensions, up and down, left and right, forward and back.

However, that's often unnecessary, and leads to time-consuming steps getting the piece locked down. Then you take more time to loosen it up and tighten it back down when you need to reorient it or swap it out with another one.

It's much more efficient to minimize the restraints to just the actual forces that will be applied, leaving the piece loose in other directions. Then you can instantly reorient it or swap it with the next piece. The time savings add up. The work flows more smoothly.

Round dog holes in my workbench give me lots of choices. In addition to holdfasts, I use simple dogs and pegs in them, plus a variety of more specialized stops. I like to use battens as planing stops, particularly ones fitted to the dog holes so they can just drop into place. I use bench hooks for fine sawing, and apply this concept to planing boards.

Add a couple more items, and you have a versatile set of work holding methods capable of handling any situation.

I use three workbench designs in my work: Chris Schwarz's Roubo with leg vise, Paul Sellers' bench with Record-style quick-release face vise, and Roy Underhill's portable bench with no vise (what, no vise?!?). I've also taught classes in rooms with nothing but bare worktables (what, no vise, no dog holes?!?).

I'm able to get the same work done on all of these by adapting my workholding strategy to the setup at hand. The latter was the most challenging, for which I created a space-age portable work surface adapted from a number of traditional methods. Since there was a left-handed student, I made one in a left-handed version.

You can see all of the methods I use here in various posts, but if you'd like the concise summary, sign up for the webinar. It'll make your hand tool woodworking faster, more effective, and more efficient.

Portable Sharpening Station

Mocking up my portable sharpening station. I want my sharpening stones and strop to be laid out ready to use wherever I am. The folded-back cardboard is to figure out the articulated lid.

I bought my first 10-speed bike over 30 years ago, when I lived in Houston, TX. It was a cheap, basic Sears bike. The derailleur for shifting gears was a decades-old design, with frame-mounted levers. I rode it along the paved Braes Bayou trail, which over its 5-mile distance probably had at most a 10-foot rise.

Shifting gears on the bike was a nuisance, because there was no way to know other than the sound of the chain when I had the shift lever in the right position, plus I had to lean down to reach the levers. So I'd be leaning over off-balance hunting back and forth to find the gear. Because of this and the flat terrain, I basically treated it as a 3-speed: starting, accelerating, and cruising. Once up to speed, I didn't change gears.

Five years later, living in hillier Dallas, I upgraded to a much nicer bike, six times the price. This had 12 speeds, but was still the same basic shifter design. New indexed shifting systems were just coming on the market at the time, along with step-in pedals, but were expensive. The terrain required me to shift more, but I was still young enough that I could just power through a limited range of gears.

By the time I bought my third bike fifteen years after that, I was living in Massachusetts, with much more varied terrain. By now we were up to 21 speeds (7-speed hub by 3-speed chain ring), and 12 times the cost of my first bike. Indexed shifting was standard equipment, with the shifters built into the brake levers. That meant I never had to remove my hands from the handlebars. Tap a brake lever sideways, and click! it shifts, the gear falling smoothly into place. No messing about trying to find the gear.

This was a major mechanical innovation in shifting systems, and completely changed the way I rode. The terrain dictated frequent shifting, and because it was easy to do, I shifted frequently. Click! Click-click! Constantly adjusting to the road. Think of driving a manual transmission car in city traffic. You constantly have to down shift after stopping, shift through a couple gears as you speed up, down shift again after hitting the brakes. You don't stay in two gears the whole time. That would put a huge load on the engine and transmission, causing failure.

Cycling is much the same, except that your legs are the engine. Hard pedaling is, well, hard! Too much of it takes the fun out. But with a good variable speed transmission that's easy to shift, you can keep pedaling at the same cadence and load no matter what. That opens up a whole new world of cycling, making it more enjoyable (especially when you've gotten old enough for enjoyment to take priority over machismo).

The point is, when it's easy to do, you'll do it more often, and enjoy the benefits of that increased frequency. In hand tools, sharpening is like that. When it's inconvenient, you put it off, and suffer as a result. For me it was inconvenient because I had to pull my stones out of a drawer, set them out on the bench, open up the cases, then put them away after use, as well as deal with the mess (sharpening is messy any way you do it). Too much interruption to my work.

I wanted to have a way to keep my sharpening stones accessible at all times, so at any moment I could step away from my work to take 30 seconds and sharpen a tool. A dedicated sharpening station is the obvious solution, but I also wanted to be able to do the same thing if I was off doing a demo or class somewhere.

My solution is a portable sharpening station with a cover that allows me to open it up and go right to work, with the stones laid out and ready, yet secure in position. It also helps contain the mess. I use Norton 3" wide oilstones, but this will also work with their 3" waterstones. You can do the same thing with other brands of oil, water, or diamond stones. They don't even have to be the same size, though that makes layout easier (my Norton translucent Arkansas stone turned out to be 1/16" longer than my coarse India stone). I also made a matching strop to go in the set.

The design is roughly like a briefcase with fitted dividers and sections, and an articulated lid that folds back. The body is 1/2" and 1/4" baltic birch plywood panels with oak banding; the dividers are all oak. The banding is raised around the bottom to form a 1/4" basin. The stones sit in this, with 1/4" thick by 3/4" wide spacers separating them.

In addition to the fitted bench stone holders, it has a fitted box to hold a set of very nice Chris Pye carving slip stones that I got recently from Tools For Working Wood, and a larger box for holding oil, strop compound, file and burnisher for sharpening scrapers, and small clamps for clamping the station to a surface. The finish is heavy duty "spar varnish" outdoor grade polyurethane, to resist the sharpening residue.

The dividers and boxes start making for some tight tolerances. Because they are small and thin, you have to be careful forming them. One half-stroke extra on the saw can ruin the appearance of a joint (though it should still be fine structurally). Fortunately, a little sawdust and glue pressed into any little imperfections cleans them up, especially in the busy open-grained oak. But in general, I give credit to Paul Sellers' Working Wood series for the tight joints and hinge mortises I was able to get.

Crosscutting a piece of 1/2" plywood for the bottom panel. I scored the cut line with a knife to avoid tearing of the outer ply.

Ripping off the excess.

Once the plywood was cut to size, I worked on the oak banding and interior parts. The bottom banding is 3/4" square cross section, with a 1/2" x 1/4" rabbet for the plywood. The dividers that form the interior boxes are 1/4" and 3/8" thick oak, which I got by resawing 3/4" stock.

Ripping down a 3/4" width of oak for the banding.

Edge jointing a section of the banding to final dimension.

My fillister plane needed a minor repair first: gluing the boxing back in place.

Ripping a section of oak for the interior dividers.

Resawing the divider stock to get a 1/4" thickness.

With the glue on the plane boxing dry, molding the rabbet in the banding. I need to make a sticking board for this.

Precision tuning of the rabbet with a small shoulder plane. Any humps or crud in the corner will prevent a good fit around the plywood edge.

Using my Tite-Mark as a thickness gauge to check the rabbet.

Closeup of the joint at the rear corner. On the left is the back piece, rabbeted to be the rear edge of the banding over the plywood. On the right is a side piece, rabbeted and notched to fit into the back piece.

With back and banding dry fitted, marking the main divider to fit.

Shooting the divider for a precise fit.

Another piece of the same stock, showing how to test for a well-shot board: if it can stand on end and stay standing when you bang on the bench, the end is dead flat and square.

With a couple of oilstones in place, fitting the position of the divider. After taking this photo, I decided to add a flat spacer between the stones and the divider. You'll see the reason for that in part 2. This also threw off the measurements in my layout sketch a bit.

The divider is the long side of an interior box. Here's one of the short-side pieces in 3/8" stock, dadoed into the back without glue. Paul Sellers says a dado should fit snug enough that you can lift the board without the crosspiece coming out.

Ripping off a 1/4" thick piece of 3/4" stock. This will be a flat spacer between stones.

Planing the surface of the 1/4" stock. Holding this thin stuff is a bit of a challenge. I had to plane it in sections, moving the holdfast around.

A brief diversion. My wife had asked me to repair the support leg on the back of an antique picture frame for a friend. The backing board is heavy fiberboard covered with velvet on one side and some kind of liner paper on the other. The leg is the same construction, hinged at the top with cloth. At some point, the frame got knocked down flat, bending the leg so that it fractured in the middle, flopping about and no longer supporting the frame.

My vague plan for repair was to glue slips of wood into the leg. I needed some more 1/4" oak divider stock, so rather than planing the remainder from the first resaw down to thickness, I decided to see if I could resaw it again and save the thin cutoff layer for the picture frame. Time to pull out my ryoba (with hardwood tooth pattern).

This is ridiculously thin resawing, but the ryoba handled it well.

Success! That's a useful skill to have.

After trimming the ultra-thin oak to shape, I glued it in between the layers of fiberboard and lining paper. That should last a hundred years. You can see the picture frame back face down on the bench-on-bench, with its bent support leg.

Back to the project. I glued up the interior box corners in multiple subassembly stages. This all goes together as a bit of a puzzle, so it's impossible to do as a single glue-up. That also allowed me to plane the dovetails flush once they were dry.

Dry fit. Except for the leftmost dado here, all the small dado and dovetail joints on the interior box and dividers are snug enough to be self-supporting without glue.

Glue-up detail of the corner of the small box: using a tiny caul to pull the dovetail in tight. I made it by chiseling a small depression in a bit of scrap pine.

Glue-up of the banding and the box assembly. I installed the hinges before gluing up the box.

To ensure good bonding of the back to the plywood, I put a caul on the underside and clamped it in place. I added two more clamps to those shown here to apply even pressure.

While the glue was drying, I made the dividers for the Chris Pye slip stones. These stones are 3" squares in several thicknesses, in coarse India and hard Arkansas, with different curve profiles one each edge. The dividers are made up from thin resawn pine, covered with a continuous layer of felt in sort of an accordion fashion.

I told you thin resawing was a good skill to have! Here's a piece of 3/4" pine resawn into 5 layers. I planed them smooth by holding down one end at a time with a holdfast.

That thing next to the plane? From Jim Kingshott's books and videos, an oil wick, made of felt rolled into a small plastic spice jar fitted into a base with sandpaper on the bottom. Just put a dab of linseed oil on the wick, then pull the plane over it on the return stroke whenever you need to lubricate the bottom. This is faster than stopping to rub wax on it. Also good for passing a saw blade across on each side. I keep it in an old tea tin to limit its oxygen supply. Linseed oil-soaked rags are notorious for starting shop fires by spontaneous combustion.

The felt-covered dividers glued-up, with spacing custom-fitted to the stones. A layer of wax paper keeps the glue off the stones.

After the glue has dried. You can see how strips of felt have been glued to the wood in a continuous fashion. This drops into the small box, no need to glue the sides in place.

Once I removed the main base from the clamps, I fitted up the bench stone spacers. Using my long shooting board, I trimmed them in succession to width until everything dropped into the main base snugly.

Test fit of the bench stones and their spacers, and the slip stones in their dividers. I was a little too tight on clearances: I had to shave off the outer layers of felt with a chisel to make the slips move smoothly.

The photo above reveals another clearance problem. Remember I said I had thrown off the measurements in my layout sketch when I moved the long divider back? Notice how the hinge rests on the corner of the slip stones. That wasn't supposed to happen. My goal in all this was to have the hinge on the top side of the case, not the back, so that when the case was standing up on its back, it would sit flat on the floor, no hinge spines in the way.

How I had drawn it up: the hinge would attach to the outside of the edge banding for the lid, which would clear the slip stone box as it pivoted up. But now as you can see the box is in the way.

New plan: rather than having the hinge close down all the way, have it close down to the quarter-open position. It will attach to the underside of the banding, leaving plenty of clearance. That means there will be a ledge at the back when the lid is closed down. Not ideal, but I can live with it.

The lid rear banding molded and mortised for the hinges. Notice how it is not flush with the back: that's because it's mortised deeply...

... so that when the lid is down, it leaves a minimal gap at the hinge line. Note the ledge formed by the banding and the back.

There are various ways I could have dealt with the hinge, but with it already secured to the back, this was simple and effective, if not the prettiest. Design changes midway through construction are bound to cause problems later! That's why you do mockups and prototypes and stare at them for a while before making any decisions. However, since this is shop furniture, I just need it to be functional.

Next will be building the articulated lid.

(Continue to part 2)

First Student

I'm happy to report that I've had two sessions with my first private instruction student, Larry Ciccolo. Larry, I'd like to thank you for putting your trust in me, and for letting me write about it!

He didn't realize he was my first victim, er, student, when he contacted me, but I told him when we were unloading my toolbox at his house. It's another milestone for me, and I appreciate the opportunity.

I recognized Larry's name from the Sawmill Creek Neanderthal Haven forum, and he tells me he's a frequent visitor to CloseGrain. He's been a power tool user for many years, but recently has developed an interest in hand tools. He works in the high-tech industry, and told me one of the reasons he was interested in my instruction is that he saw I'm a software engineer. He says he knows software engineers are always interested in doing a good job (despite the, ahem, occasional bug!).

His basement shop is well-equipped, divided into power- and hand-tool workspaces. He's clearly been paying close attention to online tool discussions. Like all of us, he loves accumulating tools. He has an excellent selection of Lie-Nielsen planes, chisels, and saws, as well as Bad Axe saws, several restored Stanley planes from Bill Rittner (rbent.ct@gmail.com) and Tablesaw Tom, and some wooden moulding planes from Matt Bickford. Most were bought new, but several items were good scores on eBay and Craigslist.

He has a beautiful cabinetmaker's workbench that he built in a class at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking ("7 days of 12 hours!"). The vises are Lie-Nielsen hardware. The face vise is an LN chain-drive vise, and it's a joy to use. He's also a member of Shannon Rogers' online Hand Tool School, where the second project is building a split-top sawbench. This is a nice style, because it fully supports the workpiece when ripping, and deals with the problem of how to finish off the rip without cutting into the bench.

I was unfamiliar with Bill Rittner and Tablesaw Tom, but a little searching online turned up several references. Chris Schwarz did a nice blog post about Bill's replacement knobs and totes. The totes are subtly different from the originals, but some quick handling shows that they would definitely be more comfortable over long planing sessions. A number of people on different forums recommended Tablesaw Tom's plane restorations. Bill also does full restorations. The planes Larry had them both restore were beautiful, rivaling the machining, fit, and finish of the Lie-Nielsens. Nothing has left the Stanley factory that nice since World War II.

Now that Larry has amassed the tools, he's amassing the skills to use them. During our first session, we discussed options for organizing his workspace. He's working on a plane till that he wants to hang, and I went over my current method of storing everything on a tool wall next to the bench. For the second session, he had moved the bench out to the center, similar to my layout.


Larry's workbench and sawbench.


The future tool wall to the right of the bench. This is plywood screwed to 2x4's, which have been tap-conned to the poured concrete wall. The plane till will hang from this.


View of the power tool area from the workbench. This is all subject to fine tuning as he gets some experience with the workflow and shuffles things around.


Laying out the plane till.

One of the benefits of private instruction is that the student decides what to cover, and how long to spend on it. Larry's primary interests were basic sawing, getting full and proper use of his planes, and dovetailing.

I like to teach by demonstrating a skill, then have the student try it, and together work out any issues that arise. Often, an operation needs to be broken down into constituent steps that we examine individually.

Two of the things that came up are common themes with woodworkers new to hand tools. First is the appropriate degree of precision for an operation. I always like to have people rip down a long board, because no one ever thinks they can keep to the line. I get them started, showing them how to steer the saw, then have them deliberately go off course so they can correct it. Naturally, this leaves a wavy cut.

Most people tend to want laser precision in this operation. I always point out that this is a rough operation, to be cleaned up in seconds with handplanes, no matter how bad off it is. Decide what tolerance you can reach at your present skill level, and leave that amount of margin. That's the appropriate degree of precision. Anything finer is wasted time. As long as you don't cross your finished dimension, any cut is acceptable here.

The next steps produce an almost magical dawning. Starting with a heavily cambered jack or scrub plane, we quickly chew the edge down to near the line, then shift to a jointer. A few quick passes with the iron set rank to get really close, then set fine for the final passes. Suddenly you realize it doesn't matter how well the rip cut went, that first meat-eater of a plane tames the ugliest edge in no time.

After doing his 4' rip cut, Larry pulled out a #6 that he said had a slightly cambered iron. I said, that's nothing, and pulled out the old wooden razee jack I had brought, since he had told me he wanted to see some wooden planes. I've ground that iron to an 8" radius. I also pulled out an ECE wooden scrub plane. I showed him how to use those to take big fat chips, taking down the high spots, or bringing the edge down to the low spots. He really liked the razee jack.

We measured a chip with a dial caliper: 55 thousandths! That's the flip side of this lesson in appropriate precision. Save those 3-thousandths shavings for later, right now we need SPEED! This thing was reducing the wood nearly twenty times as fast.

I told him what he needed was a cheap beater of a jack plane, iron cambered to 8". No point in spending the big bucks, it could be the ugliest dinged-up out-of-flat plane he could find, as long as it could hold an iron.

He thought for a moment, then pulled a dusty old wooden plane out from a shelf. He said his son had found it inside a wall in an old house. The tote was an ugly user-replacement, there were end-checks in the body, and the bed was dished and cracked. Perfect! It was even a razee. I knocked the iron loose to check it. It was a nice laid-steel iron and chip breaker, but not much length left. Just enough for one good shaping and a few sharpenings. But it's easily replaceable with a flea market iron.

So with all his fine planes, he can enjoy the irony of knowing this refugee from some distant past workshop will be his primary power tool for fast stock removal.


With a new tote and a cambered iron, this will become Larry's meat-eater.

After this we went through the FEWTEL sequence to four-square a board, then used several moulding planes on it.

The second thing that came up is learning to relax, especially when sawing. You're body is really part of the tool. You want to move in smooth, fluid strokes, extracting as much power as possible without wearing yourself out. Under the pressure of doing a good job, it's easy to tense up, get a death-grip on the tool. For precision operations like sawing dovetails, this ruins your control. For rough operations like heavy ripping, this wastes energy.

Correspondingly, heavy sawing and planing are the most laborious operations. They make you sweat, putting a lot of stress on the body, especially if you're not used to that level of activity. Again, relax, chill out and pace yourself. The tendency here is to try to become a human power tool, able to zip right through a board. That'll wear you out fast.

Find the steady level you're able to maintain, allowing you to work for extended periods while keeping it enjoyable. Take a break and catch your breath. In the long run it's far more efficient than trying to race through a board and exhausting yourself, or worse, hurting yourself.

Those were the broader lessons. When we got to the nitty gritty details of dovetailing, my main point was that I'm just showing one possible way; treat that as a baseline. There are many variations, everybody from the micrometer folks to the shoot-from-the-hip folks. From the fundamentals, you can branch out to all the other methods and decide which ones you like best.

Once again, Larry, thanks for the opportunity!

Intro Hand Tools: The Workspace

Go: Intro Hand Tools Main Page | Table Of Contents

A hand tool workspace is very simple to set up, requiring as little as 4'x6'. More room is better of course, but you can setup almost anywhere. The only power requirements are for lighting. You can use a corner of a garage or basement, a porch, a backyard storage shed, even a spare bedroom, since there's less noise and dust than with power tools. You can also use a portable setup and work under a tent or tarp, or completely out in the open.

Workbench and Appliances
Sawbench and Sawhorses
Tool Storage
First Aid Kit

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Workbench and Appliances

The characteristics of a bench for hand tool work are driven primarily by the requirements of planing. If you have a bench that allows you to plane comfortably, you can do any other operation on it. It needs to be the right height (most modern benches intended for use with power tools are too high), it has to be stable enough to resist the forces of planing, and it has to be able to hold the workpieces in several orientations. Work-holding features will affect your efficiency. Simple work-holding allows you to work quickly. Complex work-holding takes more time.

Height is personal, sized to you. Different authors vary on the exact relative dimension, but in general if you stand next to the bench with your arm at your side, the bench top should be between your knuckles and your wrist. It also depends on the planes you typically use; metal-bodied planes tend to be an inch or two lower than wooden-bodied planes. When the bench is the right height, you can get over your planes with your upper body as you work, so you can use body mass to move them, not just your arms. Too high a bench means your arms are bent while planing, and they'll tire quickly. Too low means you're working bent over, which will give you a sore back.

Stability comes from good structural design and from mass. Poor structure means the bench will rack and vibrate as you plane. Even with a solid structure, if the bench is too light it will move around. In general, the more massive, the better, unless portability is a requirement. A light bench can be braced up against something or secured to a wall or some kind of anchor to keep it in place.

There are many workbench designs. Realize that each is a compromise in one way or another, due to conflicting requirements. A bench that's perfect for one operation will be less than ideal for others.

Here are examples of large and small workbenches, and a portable work surface. You can read more about building the first two here: My Roubo and Portable Workbench.


Large Roubo-style workbench, with leg vise, crochet, sliding deadman along the front, planing stop, and Veritas Wonder Dog in place of a tail vise. Two Gramercy Tools holdfasts sit in dog holes. The entire front of this bench is coplanar, allowing the legs and stretcher to act as clamping surfaces.


Portable workbench. The legs fold down from the top on hinges, and are secured for use with angled braces. This bench features a frog (similar to the crochet above), planing stop with battens in dog holes, holdfast, and Wonder Dog. The front apron also has dog holes, and can act as a clamping surface.


Portable work surface, built from a quarter sheet of plywood. 2x4's are screwed to the front and left side to form an apron that hooks over the corner of a tabletop, turning any table into a makeshift workbench. Workholding is provided by modern T-track. The rear batten mounts flat in the tracks. This is for left-handed planing; for right-handers, attach the side apron on the right end.

You need to be able to hold your workpieces for face planing both across and with the grain, as well as edge and end planing. Sometimes you'll be planing small pieces, sometimes long boards.

Face planing: You can clamp the piece in place with bench dogs or some type of tail vise, or leave it loose and work it against planing stops. Both methods have their benefits; either way the piece is flat on the bench.

Clamped, the workpiece and bench form a solid mass. You just have to make sure the clamping setup doesn't get in the way of the plane. Using stops, you plane across the workpiece toward the stop, trapping the piece.

Some benches just have small narrow stops, so it takes more practice to learn how to direct the force of the plane always toward the stop. Other benches have wide stops, and may have stops in two directions, so you can plane generally into the corner they form. This is easy and fast, no fiddling with any clamp setup. You just have to get used to the workpiece sliding around a bit as you work it.

When face planing rough wood, you direct the plane at an angle that can be anywhere from straight across the grain to diagonal. For further flattening and smoothing once the rough work is done, you direct the plane at an angle anywhere between diagonal and straight with the grain.


Face planing against a narrow planing stop. The stop raises and lowers to accommodate different thicknesses.


Face planing against battens. The planing stop provides one support, while dowels in the battens drop into dog holes to provide the remainder.

Edge planing: You can secure the work across the front face of the bench, or rest it up on edge on the bench, stopped or clamped similar to face planing. Wide boards generally need to be secured to the front. Some benches have front aprons to accommodate this. Others rely on a thick top, and may have legs or other features coplanar with the front edge, so that they form a large flat clamping surface.

The board end may be trapped in a jam stop such as a frog or crochet, its lower edge simply resting on pegs inserted in the front of the bench, or it may be clamped more securely. Smaller, narrower pieces can be worked easily against a planing stop on the top of the bench once the bottom edge is reasonably square. As with surface planing using stops, this is fast and simple.


Edge planing the piece against the planing stop.


Edge planing a large piece with the end wedged into the frog, resting on holdfasts or pegs. If the piece wobbles, flip a holdfast up and knock it in to secure it.

End planing: You can secure the workpiece standing up against the front of the bench, or lay it down on a shooting board.

Many benches have a face vise and an end vise, but other configurations are also practical. A leg vise is a large vise that mounts to one of the front legs; the leg forms a clamping surface. There are various front and end-mounted twin-screw vises, where you place workpieces in between the screws and tighten down on each side. A wagon vise is a type of end vise that moves a bench dog against the work, and also provides an opening where you can clamp pieces.

Benches will usually have dog holes on the surface and along the front. In addition to using bench dogs and pegs in these holes, you can also use holdfasts, a simple and ancient method of holding work. Used on the top, they hold the piece down. Used on the front, they hold it up against the bench. Holdfasts should be of wrought iron or ductile steel, not cast iron, which is too stiff and brittle.


Workpiece secured with a holdfast. Bash it down with a mallet to set in place, bash it behind the crook to loosen it.

Dog holes will be in line with planing stops and vises to form one side of a clamping setup. Simple wooden wedges can be used to secure a piece between two dogs or between a dog and planing stop.


Using opposing wedges to lock a piece in place against a bench dog.

The one real compromise with a good planing bench is that it tends to be uncomfortably low for other operations. There are several appliances for raising your work: risers that slide under the feet of the bench to raise the whole thing; smaller auxilliary benches that sit on top of the bench, held in place with clamps or holdfasts; and removable auxilliary face vises that clamp on top. Most of the work-holding methods used for planing will be useful for other operations.


Bench-on-bench to raise the work to a comfortable height. In addition to clamping pieces for joinery, this provides an elevated work surface.


Moxon double-screw vise is another way to hold and raise the work.

After planing, chopping mortises with a chisel is the next heavy operation. This requires pounding with a mallet. But a bench robust enough for planing should be sturdy enough for mortising. Again, more mass is better.

The two primary appliances for working on a bench are a bench hook and a shooting board.

Bench hook: This allows you to hold a piece in place while crosscut sawing, without requiring clamps. It can be used for both rough and fine sawing. It's very simple and crude, consisting of a bed with a cleat on the front that catches the front edge of the bench, and a cleat at the back that stops the workpiece.


Bench hook.


The bench hook in use. Hand pressure keeps everything in place while sawing.

Shooting board: This is the precision secret weapon of hand tool work. It allows you to fine-tune the end of a board for angle or length with a plane. It can also be used to plane along the edge of a board; luthiers use this method for book-matching the pieces that form the body of a musical instrument. Similar in appearance to a bench hook, with front cleat and rear stop, it must be built carefully. In addition to the basic 90 degree shooting board for square ends, there are various versions or angle blocks for mitering at different angles.



Shooting board. This one allows shims to be placed behind the face of the stop for fine tuning to get the exact 90 degree angle.


The shooting board in use. The work is held the same way as the bench hook, while a plane is run on its side across the end. In this way the end of the board can be trimmed one fine shaving at a time for a perfect fit.

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Sawbench and Sawhorses

A sawbench is a low bench that comes up to your knee, used when sawing larger pieces of lumber. You lay your board flat on the sawbench and kneel on it with one knee to hold it in place while sawing. This puts the work at a good height for powering the saw with your arm. It also allows you to work quickly, because most of the time you don't need to clamp the board.

You can use the sawbench for both crosscut and rip sawing, in the space in front of your main workbench. Besides the workbench, this is what defines the minimum workspace you need.

As with workbenches, there are a few different styles. Some are designed to make ripping a little easier, supporting the board on both sides of the rip cut as you run the saw down the center of the bench.

Sawbenches work well in pairs or with sawhorses to catch the offcut.


Two sligthly different sawbenches right and left, and two styles of sawhorse in the center. Behind them is a shaving horse, a specialized bench for holding pieces while working with drawknife or spokeshave.

Like the workbench, the height of the sawbench is personal. Since it comes to your knee, it also makes a good sitting bench, for sitting at the workbench or  sitting on pieces to hold them while mortising.


Crosscutting on a sawbench, with a trestle-style sawhorse supporting the other end.

Sawhorses are simple work supports. Their narrow top means they must be used in pairs or with other supports. They can be sized to different heights for different needs, or used similarly to a sawbench.

There are two popular designs, trestle style, and the classic four legs splayed from the top piece.

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Tool Storage

You need to store your tools in a way that protects them and makes them easily accessible. Disorganization slows you down. Tools also need to be protected from corrosion. This can be a difficult problem in some workspaces that are constantly damp.

During the course of a project, you'll need to use a variety of tools. They need to be easily accessible so you can pick them up quickly without having to dig around or search for them. Just as important, they neeed to be easy to put away. This prevents things from piling up. Piled tools are messy, hard to locate, and an accident waiting to happen when something falls, damaging the tool or its edge, or injuring you.

I've come to prefer open hanging storage next to my workbench, so that I can reach a tool in a step or two, use it, then put it back immediately. I find it annoying and time consuming to have to walk across the shop or around things, reach over things, and open drawers or cabinets. I also tend to be a piler, so I'm better off not having horizontal surfaces to set thing down on.

I prefer to have everything to the side rather than over my workbench, because I have the bench out away from the wall for maximum accessibiliy. Since I have a basement workshop, positioning it near a window for natural light isn't a consideration.


Simple hanging panels to the side of the workbench.

For damp environments where you may prefer to close them up, hanging cabinets that can be opened up while you work are effective. Cabinets can also be locked to keep small children out.

In addition to the wall storage, I use a rolling shop cart with shelves to hold the tools I need for the moment. I model the use of the cart on my wife's job. She's a surgical nurse. In surgery, a patient lying on the operating table is like a workpiece lying on the workbench, and the instruments are the tools. The field of work needs to be kept clear, so all the instruments are laid out on tables and carts; this makes locating them and accounting for them easy. Similarly, this method keeps my workbench clear of loose tools, yet they are right next to me as I work. I just need to clear off the cart as I complete each set of operations so it doesn't pile up.

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First Aid Kit

Working with wood and sharp tools, splinters and minor cuts are inevitable. A simple first aid kit consisting of fine tweezers, antiseptic wipes, bandaids, and gauze pads is sufficient for most injuries. Butterfly closures are also useful for larger cuts.

The worst injury you're likely to encounter is a deep cut from a chisel that slips and sinks into your flesh. This can be quite serious. Other than wrapping with gauze to control the bleeding, this kind of injury requires professional care.

You should also be up to date on your tetanus shot, especially if you use old tools that are rusty.