What is a Bench Dog? A bench dog is a wooden or metal dowel that rises up or down in your woodworking bench top to clamp wood between with your workbench vise. Having a bench dog set is essential to a wooden workbench, as they allow you to wedge your work piece between the tail vise and the bench dogs that sit in your bench dog holes. Bench dogs come in an assortment of materials, shapes, and sizes. Most commercial workbenches come with metal bench dogs; some round and some square.

Both a round bench dog and a rectangular bench dog seem to work fine for me. However, there’s a danger of seriously chipping your hand plane blade if you’re not careful. That would cause you a lot of work to re-grind and re-hone your hand plane blade. So on all the workbenches that I’ve built, I’ve made wooden bench dogs.

And I prefer round bench dogs, primarily because I can just buy wooden dowels from the hardware store to make them. Also, it’s much easier to add round bench dog holes to your wooden workbench top than it is to add square holes. You can watch the video at the top of this page to see how I make wooden bench dogs and how I use a power router to add accurate bench dog holes into my wooden workbench top.

Just a quick tip on how to make bench dog holes in a wooden workbench top: to make a lot of consistently-sized bench dog holes, and also holdfast holes, I use a plunge router with an adjustable fence, and plunge as deep as I can with a ¾-inch or a 1-inch spiral up-cut bit. It’s super easy to just move down the bench as you plunge. Then I finish boring the hole with a spade bit in a powerful corded drill.

You can certainly do this with a brace and bit, but just be prepared for it to take a lot longer, and maybe have holes that aren’t as tight. I stop just when the lead screw exits the bottom of the workbench, and then I bore back up through that small hole. This gives me clean bench dog holes.

As I just mentioned, to make a bench dog set I buy wooden dowels from the hardware store. I’ve used both ¾-inch oak dowels and 1-inch poplar dowels, and both wood species have worked fine. I cut the bench dog to length – a little longer than the workbench’s thickness is nice. Then I use a handsaw and chisel to add a flat face to the top of the dowel. I sometimes also add a notch to the bottom end of the bench dog, so I can hold abnormally-shaped pieces of wood.

And my friend Will Myers, who I showed assembling his Moravian Workbench in 58 seconds in a video on the previous page, introduced me to a pretty cool way to keep these round bench dogs from slipping through the workbench top.

I bore a little hole in the bench dog, and epoxy a little 1/4-inch bullet cabinet door catch inside. It works really great to hold the bench dog in place. I couldn’t find these brass cabinet latches in any stores where I live, but I eventually tracked them down online. The best place I’ve found these is here. They’re cheap, but the shipping is a bit expensive. But even with shipping it’s still the cheapest source I’ve found. Square bench dogs have similar spring methods for holding them in place.

And below are some sources for good metal bench dogs, if that’s the route that you’d like to take:

• Here are the round metal bench dogs that came with my Sjobergs workbench: click here
• Here is a huge selection of more affordable bench dogs on Highland Woodworking: click here
• See a bench dog selection on Amazon: click here

Here’s a video that I made on how to make bench dogs, bench dog holes, and holdfast holes:

A bench hook lets you quickly hold your work piece in place while sawing across the grain, without having to clamp your piece down on your wooden workbench. I also use a bench hook a lot when doing chisel work when I’m making joints.

You should really make a bench hook yourself. In fact, I’m not even sure if anyone sells them…I sure hope you can’t buy one! I built all of my bench hooks from scrap pieces of wood. The type of wood that you use doesn’t really matter, because a bench hook is meant to be replaced when it gets worn out. It should take just a few minutes to make, by just cutting the two ends off of a board, and gluing them on opposite sides. In my Introduction to Hand Tool Woodworking class students use a variety of hand tools to square up a board, and then they cut it up into two bench hooks. They love it.

Here is a video that I published on making a bench hook (you can also read the article here):

A hand planing stop is a workbench accessory that’s used to give you a quick surface to butt your wood up against when hand planing wood, when you don’t want to clamp it between bench dogs on your wooden workbench. There are, of course, both affordable and expensive commercial metal hand planing stops, where the metal claws pop up to dig into the board. This one was forged by renowned blacksmith, Peter Ross:

I’ve also seen people file teeth on a railroad spike to use as a hand planing stop. There are many options. In-bench metal hand planing stops are pretty cool to use. But, you can also just use a block of wood that slides up and down in the bench top:

The disadvantage of the above styles of hand planing stop is that you have to mortise the planing stops into the top of your wooden workbench. But that may not be something that bothers you. But I find it easier, and cheaper, to just make a simple hand planing stop that attaches to the workbench or inside a workbench vise.

The first style of attachable hand planing stops are those that fit into your bench dogs, like the hand planing stop pictured above, with dowels that fit into your bench dog holes. These can be made out of scrap wood and short dowels. And some companies sell metal versions of this style.

My personal preference, which we use in my school, is to just make a simple (and cheap) hand planing stop out of a quarter inch thick board that’s glued to a scrap block of wood. It doesn’t even need screws. And I clamp this type of hand planing stop in my woodworking bench vise:

I like a thin board like this so I can hand plane smaller boards. This quarter inch thick poplar board can be purchased at your local hardware store, if you don’t have an easy way to make thin stock. And I just glue it to a scrap piece of wood. But if you like the idea of buying a hand planing stop, here are links to places where you can buy different hand planing stops:

• See hand planing stops at Highland Woodworking
• See metal bar hand planing stop at Lee Valley
• See metal popup mortised hand planing stop at Lee Valley

A shooting board is a wooden workbench appliance used to square, and miter the end grain on your pieces of wood.

It can also be used to square edges of boards. Most woodworkers make their own shooting board in their workshop, but there are some people who sell wooden shooting boards. And if you’re lucky you can even find a cool antique metal shooting board (see them here on Ebay).

A shooting board is used by laying a larger handplane on its side, and then pushing the sharp hand plane along on a base to remove a little bit of wood at a time, until your piece is square or mitered.

There are many shooting board designs & tutorials in books and online, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding one that you like, and that isn’t too difficult for you to make. Below are a few shooting board designs and shooting board tutorials that I like:

Shooting Board Designs & Plans:

The below video from Timothy Rousseau and Fine Woodworking Magazine shows how to make my style of shooting board:

Here’s another good short video by Lee Valley tools that shows how to make a different type of simple shooting board:

Here’s a great tutorial, by Rob Cosman, on how to make his excellent shooting board:

You can also download these free PDF shooting board plans from Lie-Nielsen.

Most house joiners of the past stored their beloved woodworking hand tools in a large tool chest so they could transport them from job to job and keep them safe. The cabinetmakers (furniture makers) typically stored their tools on shelves and in cabinets since they didn’t travel to jobs sites, but worked in their own workshops.

As far as tool storage goes, I prefer storing my tools on shelves (see bottom of this page) and in smaller, easier to transport, tool chests, because I almost never transport a lot of my woodworking hand tools.

But Christopher Schwarz and Roy Underhill (among others) have been popularizing large woodworking tool chest designs in recent years, so many modern traditional woodworkers have jumped into building a large joiner’s tool chest. Chris Schwarz introduces his “Anarchist’s Tool Chest” and his “Dutch Tool Chest” on both of these Woodwright’s Shop Episodes:

I highly recommend that you purchase “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest” book & the accompanying DVD. This really is a great book & DVD that show not only how to build the Anarchist tool chest, but which tools to fill it with.

Another great option is to buy an antique woodworking tool chest. You can find these at estate sales, yard sales, and even on Ebay (here). Many of the small wooden chest designs that you’ll find are engineer’s tool chests. But a woodworker’s tool chest is a large box with a lid and has sliding trays inside.

Usually a tool chest like this has a functional lock and strong handles for carrying the tool chest.

You can even buy or make a sailor’s tool chest like this one that Tom Calisto made:

But whatever tool chest you decide upon, just make sure that it is a tool chest design that works for your shop and your woodworking hand tools. Don’t just get a style of tool chest that is popular with other woodworkers.

Like I mentioned earlier, I prefer hand tool cabinets and storage shelves over large tool chests. Renowned woodworkers Frank Klausz and Don Williams told me that they also feel this way. I have built quite a few shelves and tool cabinets to store my woodworking hand tools. Here is one saw till that holds some of my hand saws and hand planes:

An alternative to a large tool chest or a small tool chest is a woodworking hand tool tote. I really like to have a wooden workbench tote or two to hold my most-used small tools. I can move the tote around all the workbenches in my woodworking school, or move it off a bench if needed. The best option would be to make one similar to this one that I made:

I even made handy internal tool dividers so I can organize and store a lot of little tools and marking gauges is my woodworking school.

You can even buy a tool tote or small tool box for cheap, like these on ebay or at flea markets.