An observation that may be obvious to others
Bill Houghton, retired fun in Sebastopol, CA
>With the discussions of workbenches lately, I thought I'd mention something I noted in making the bed molding last week. My bench dog system uses a small Record vise as a tail vise, with the dogs then centered on the vise's sliding dog. This puts the bench dogs about 4 inches (10 cm for you metric folks) in from the front of the bench.
It surprised me, in making the molding, to find that this was a problem. Some of the planing would have worked far better if the dogs were closer to the front edge of the bench, say 2 inches (50 cm). I'm going to need to think about this when my bench goes through its next evolution. I've been considering a different dog design anyhow; this spurs me to thinking more about it.
Another note: when planing the angles at the edges, I should NOT have used a No. 78. The benchtop now has a long angled groove in it where the corner of the iron plowed a furrow. Oh well - I'm getting ready to replace that (ugly painted solid-core door) top anyway (with an unpainted, slightly more attractive solid-core door from my father's garage).