How to get Free

Somehow woodworkers got convinced that every piece of wood must be gripped in a vise, or a clamp, or (less often) a holdfast before any work happens. To make a cut without the wood locked down is difficult and even downright dangerous.

Except that’s all bullshit.

Before we got obsessed with holding things tight, woodworkers held their work rarely and briefly. Consider Peter Nicholson’s famous bench:

While the apron is pierced with peg-holes for long boards, the top is strangely bare. There’s not a single hole for a dog, and Nicholson doesn’t even mention holdfasts, so they probably weren’t common when he wrote. There’s only one vise, and it’s a basic affair. Nicholson calls the vise jaws “checks” and says the vise’s function is to “fasten boards between the checks, in order to plane their edges” (87).*

That’s it. The vise holds boards so they can edge-planed. To be sure, Nicholson was a carpenter and was writing primarily about house joinery, not furniture making, but that style of building was intricate and required work that was like furniture but on a larger scale. How did that craft survive with no tail-vise, no hold-fasts, no dogs, and few (if any) clamps?

Those artisans worked “free”, with the wood merely sitting on the benchtop. All kinds of operations (like chopping out the waste between dovetails) can be done this way, with nothing holding the work. When the work requires more than gravity to hold it in place, the artisan’s body is often enough. The saw-bench and mortising stool were both common appliances in the pre-industrial shop. Each of these allowed the worker to sit or kneel on the wood and get straight to work. There’s no need to clamp, because bodyweight provides surprising grip and working low brings larger muscles to bear.

This detail from The Carpenter’s Shop shows the saw-bench and the mortising stool being ridden by energetic workmen. If you’ve never sawn at a low bench, give it a try. You’ll be shocked at how you power through the work. When you’ve completed a cut, or you need to flip the board, merely stand up, and the wood is free to be turned, rotated, or carried away.

In the modern shop, we clamp many pieces that only need to be “stopped.” All the force comes from one direction and in a straight line. Resist this force, and your work will hold still. If you’re sawing the shoulders of a tenon, the saw wants to push the work away from you.

Place the wood in a pair of bench-hooks, push on it with your free hand, and get sawing. This three-point hold is rock-solid, and the work won’t budge. You’ll need to flip the board for that other shoulder, but you just relax your grip and then flick the board to the other side. That’s real quick-release.

The appliances I’ve mentioned so far are all cheap and effective, but none quite matches the humble planing stop, which sticks out of the bench and stops the wood from flying off the bench as you plane it. This is why Nicholson only uses his vise for edges; all his face-planing was done on the bench-top, right against the stop. Scroll back up to that picture, and you’ll see Nicholson’s stop right above the vise. It’s helpfully labeled “a” so you don’t miss it. Nicholson mentions that the stop is “sometimes covered with an iron plate, the front edge of which is formed into sharp teeth for sticking fast into the end of the wood to be planed in order to prevent it from slipping” (89).* The teeth are a good idea and make the stop much more useful.

In this more modern image, we can see the stop at work, holding a board while face-planing, demonstrated to the youths clustered around the bench. The stop is just a piece of steel with teeth filed into one edge, but it’s fitted to a wooden post, and the post is then mortised into the benchtop… this is where we get into trouble.

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If you built your bench with a stop in mind, then you’re all set. But many of us had never even heard of a planing stop when we built our benches, and digging that huge hole in the top seems extreme. Even worse, what if you make the whole modification and find you don’t like it? What then?

If your bench is already built, allow me to suggest the Compass Rose “Ready-Set” Planing Stop. This stop comes pre-set to 3/8” (9.5mm) off the benchtop, and this height is perfect for almost any thickness of stock. The stop screws right down to the bench-top with three included screws, so it installs in seconds.

You might not like the idea of those teeth pointing at you all day, so we’re also including our exclusive “Safe Stop” cover. It’s made from durable nylon, and it slips right over those teeth to keep them out of your way when you’re not using the stop. You can get the stop, the cover, and the screws as a complete kit and install it on any bench.

If you’d like to work free, you can. It only costs a few dollars. Oh, and you need to change your mind, but that’s free of charge.

*Quotations from Nicholson come from the Lost Art Press edition.