Wedging your work.

[Dave Shepard]

I have a workbench in the garage, but it really isn't setup for real woodworking vises. I have been screwing little blocks of pine on the top to plane against. I've been wanting to make some paired wedges to hold the work pieces better. I came across a couple of blocks of black locust this past week, and took them to a friend who has a tablesaw. He made me several sets of short and long wedge pairs. He uses a lot of wedges in his architectural stonework, so he has kind of a wild freehand table saw technique for making perfectly matched pairs. I only needed a few, so I left him the rest of the blocks.

They needed to be cleaned up a little, well, they didn't really, but I can be a little bit of a perfectionist sometimes. : : : I made up a little fixture to plane the wedges, and due to the pieces being wedges, it is fully adjustable. ;D



I screwed a little block of pine to a short piece of 1x6 pine, and this I put on the pullout of my office desk, and butted it against the desktop. Yes, locust shavings will jam up an office chair wheel pretty well. : Just slide the bottom wedge in or out to adjust the cutting height. I clamped them together and matched them for width and length with the block plane.



The finished pair of short wedges will go from 1/4" to about 1", and are 3/4" wide. Most of the pairs will get split in half, at 2", they will be too tall for most workpieces. I am sure that I will find other uses for them as I start building stuff in the workshop. I'd like to hear some other uses for wedges in the woodworking shop.


Dave

[logwalker]

How do you use those things? I couldn't see how they would hold anything.  Joe

[Dave Shepard]

The way I'm using them is in place of a tail vice on a traditional cabinetmakers bench. Typically, you would put a bench dog in one of the holes along the edge, and clamp the workpiece with the tail vise. I have little pieces of board sheetrock screwed (  : ) to my benchtop, and I wedge the workpiece in between those scraps. I'll try to get a pic at some point.


Dave

[Dave Shepard]

Here is a picture for you. The two blocks with the screws in them are scraps of pine 1x4. The piece I'm holding down is red oak, it's a piece for the base of my boring machine. There is another block at the other end of the red oak. The wedges are the only way to provide any clamping without a vise.





Dave