I made it. It's just a piece of 1/4" mild steel from the home center store. Just cut the shape with a hack saw or whatever kind of saw (refine with a file), file the teeth, and drill the holes. It's basically like the Benchcrafted one except it cost about 5 cents. They use a complicated barrel system to secure it because you don't have much strength screwing into end grain. But you don't need that. Here's a pic with it raised and you can see I drilled a 1" hole and stuck an oak dowel in there for the screws to bite into. That did double my costs from 5 cents to 10 cents though! If you look carefully the metal is tilted up about 1 degree so you don't have the experience of missing the teeth only to have your plane whack the back (which would really suck with a wood plane).Originally Posted by Izzy Camire
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I did another one with a more traditional stem design on a different bench, but again I have no blacksmithing skills. So I cut the shape with the stem and just put a bend in it. I only have a propane torch, which doesn't get super hot, so it was slow going to make sure I didn't overstress the steel. It's 3/16th thick stock because I couldn't pull it off with 1/4" (couldn't get it hot enough - too thick for a propane torch to make a tight bend). I screwed up making the hole and it was loose so I resorted to epoxying it in.
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Neither of these were terribly time consuming to fabricate, even with my pathetic metal working skills (pretty much zero).
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