Bench Hooks and Shooting Boards

[John Sanford]

Pretty much every example of a bench hook or shooting board that I see is constructed using solid hardwood. Is there any particular reason for the apparent exclusion of plywoods and softwoods, aside from possible neandersnobbishness?

[Joel Goodman]

I was at the LN event at Cerritos College yesterday and Deneb from LN had a shooting board made from MDF -- he commented that it's available up to 10 feet long. Now that would be a shooting board!

[Pam Niedermayer]

I made my shooting board base of plywood, with solid wood for fences and runners. Works just fine.

Pam

[Michael Faurot]

The various bench hook style tools I've made and my shooting board are all made mostly of plywood, along with scraps of various types of hardwood.

As for why the examples you've seen are mostly hardwood, I can only guess. One guess though would be that if the examples you've been looking at are coming from a prominent magazine, tool maker, author, web site, etc.--the hardwood version is just going to have more visual appeal than the same thing made with plywood or MDF.

[Robert Rozaieski]

One reason for the all solid wood versions is if you build it with hand tools. Plywood and MDF aren't very kind to hand tools due to all the extremely abrasive glues. If you want to see a chisel edge or plane blade dull in a hurry use them on some mdf or plywood.

My very first shooting board and bench hook were plywood with hardwood fences. The plywood bench hook chewed up my crosscut saw teeth pretty bad after much use though so my current one is solid pine with hardwood fences. The pine is easier on saw blades than the plywood.

[Pedro Reyes]

Just to echo Robert, in addition to how you build them, I made my shooting board out of solid wood not for neandersnobishness but because I don't want my blades touching plywood or MDF. My bench hook is pine with oak fences, it is also used to chop a thing here or there and so pine is better to drive a chisel than non-snoby plywood ;)

/p

[Dave Spaeder]

I made mine out of plywood bases and oak fences just because I happened to have those sitting around in roughly the right dimensions at the time. I figured the stability of the plywood would be a plus. I didn't really think about the "wear-on-the-tools" issue, but I did figure that it was simple enough to build them that I could always make new ones if these didn't do the trick.

[Narayan Nayar]

I made mine out of MDF because the voices in my head told me to. :)

But seriously, I did make my shooting board out of 3/4 MDF mounted onto 1/2" BB ply but the various fences are hardwood. The only thing that's going to come in contact with the MDF is the miter plane blade, which I sharpen regularly, and the contact point isn't the cutting edge anyway (it's lower).

My bench hooks I made out of scrap hardwood. Because I generally have a lot of scrap hardwood.

[harry strasil]

I have one set of oak bench hooks, all the rest are of pine.

All my shootboards are of pine except the adjustable one has an oak fence, arms and the diagonal adjuster/lock.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v81/irnsrgn/wood/adjustableshootboard.jpg

[Pam Niedermayer]

One reason for the all solid wood versions is if you build it with hand tools. Plywood and MDF aren't very kind to hand tools due to all the extremely abrasive glues. If you want to see a chisel edge or plane blade dull in a hurry use them on some mdf or plywood.

My very first shooting board and bench hook were plywood with hardwood fences. The plywood bench hook chewed up my crosscut saw teeth pretty bad after much use though so my current one is solid pine with hardwood fences. The pine is easier on saw blades than the plywood.


True, so I got a plywood ready Japanese saw from LV, works great, cuts through ply better than my crummy circular saw (burns and binds like a champ). Since I use so little ply, it's likely to last a long, long time.

Pam