Reply To: A Eureka moment?
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I also do a hybrid of Mike Siemsen’s workholding with a somewhat PS-inspired bench, tons of dog holes everywhere and a flush QR steel vise. Because I’m inexperienced, I frequently need / want to examine the progress I’m making, so having the work “free” (where it’s butted up against stops, as opposed to clamped in a vise or by holdfasts) is my default condition, because it reduces the time penalty to conduct such examinations (the Renaissance Woodworker did a great video recently on this exact topic), so you’ll conduct them as frequently as needed, which leads to better results, or so the theory goes.
I thought about making a crochet to hold in the vise, but then decided that I wanted a dedicated crochet, so I just made one on the opposite side of my bench. If your bench is up against a wall, that’s obviously not an option.
I kept the well, but that may have been a sub-optimal choice…wells are highly addictive, and the ease of just leaving tools in the well may have made me a lazier woodworker. When I’m deep into any project, my cabinets are looking bare and the well is full, and then I have to hunt around for tools in the grab-bag of my well. Also, you can have both a well and the center strip. My center strip is much like Mike’s, it has cutouts to keep it in place once it’s offset from it’s home, and allow it to be set at a few different heights. I have two such strips, one along each side of the well.
Workholding is just a system which makes sense to you, and how you work best. I like to maintain what little concentration I can muster, so I prefer not to break away to replace / access tools in cabinets or drawers (hence the well) or muck around with workholding (hence the preference for simple stops). That’s also why I made my bench as large as I could…so I can have a couple of things going on at the same time, without having to re-dedicate the bench for each task. That way my flow keeps flowing…the downside of that is sometimes I’ll be flowing in the wrong direction, and without any interruption to make me think about the current context, I’ll amplify a small mistake into a large one.