A curious contraption recently appeared beneath the bench of one of my students ‘Now what do you think this is? said Bruce with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips. The object in question seemed to be a cross between a mitre trap and a shooting board. It wasn't clear but it seemed to have been made by a craftsman to enable mitred components of relatively small size to be shot accurately with a ‘;n ~ bench plane. A great deal of care had gone into the making of this jig and the thought occurred to me that we spend quite a lot of our time making, jigs, fixtures, whim whams and jee jaws. All with the hope that they will enable us to do our job that little bit easier. These implements vary from a simple bench hook to the most obscure one off jig that has helped some poor devil to make his four table legs exactly the same. I have a room in workshop 2 called the "jig room". This blessed sanctuary is solely devoted to the storage and maintenance of the workshops jigs and fixtures. We try in vain to keep the jig room tidy and ordered but it only takes someone like me to go rummaging around for "old watsits clever jig" and the place is in a tip again. Some of these jigs are highly revered and have earned me a great deal of money. There are others that are well documented, the maker has written on it t~. name of the job, how the jigs were used and what results were obtained. These jigs are quite highly revered even though we know that the probability of using them again is not great. There are other jigs and these make up he vast majority, that are nothing but meaningless pieces of MDF — they helped the poor devil who created them to do the job in hand but we know for a fact that they will never be used ever again. It breaks my heart to part with them for they represent my unrealise profit. They have all taken ages to make, each jig, like the mitre trap shown to me by Bruce may well have had hours of loving care lavished upon them. Sometimes the time taken to make the jig has been far greater than the time saved in the production of the job in hand but isn't that always the way of it, don't you just enjoy making these whim whams?

This month I will talk about those "workshop made tools" that have a wider application than the usual job related jigs or fixtures. These will be appliances that would almost invariably be hand made by the craftsman and used as a personal bench tool. Some of them are very common indeed, and will be found on almost every craftsman's workbench, and will already be familiar to many of you, some are a little more unusual.

The first and most useful implement and many of you will already own one would be a bench hook. This would be used in conjunction with a tenon saw or dovetail saw either when cutting joints en trimming a component to dimension. Almost invariably it will be used cutting across the grain and will act both as a steady for the job and as backing up material for the cut in hand. In this way, the bench hook can become "worn out" in use acquiring the scars of the saw used to trim components to length. This is a humble and very useful old friend. 

The second tool that gets a lot of use in our workshop is the shooting board We have got I think two or three of these things knocking around the workshop, none of them are terribly accurate but if they were used for the purpose for which they were designed they would to do a very good job. A shooting board are most effective when used to trim thin components to dimension. A common use in our shop is the dimensioning of drawer components. A drawer side may be no thicker than 4—5mm but needs to fitted to a drawer opening with great accuracy. Balancing a bench plane on the top of a thin drawer side clamped in a bench vice is not the best way of doing this job but this doesn't stop people from attempting it. By using a shooting board you are controlling the attitude of the cutter to the job and this by the way is a single function of all the best jigs that have ever been invented. See dia. 2. Whilst the shooting board is, I feel most successful when used with the grain, it is also possible to trim boards across the grain, though you do have to hold the job very tightly against the fence to prevent any break out. When you are doing this operation, my best advice is to ask you to remember the cabinetmakers eleventh commandment which is "Thou shalt not spelch".

The third jig is a variation on this shooting board, which is a mitre shooting board!.  You can make a mitre shooting board by adapting your existing shooting board by the simple addition of a suitably shaped mitre fence. I remember making one of these contraptions many years ago and using it with rather erratic results. The problem is if you are trying to trim a mitre of any size, it is very difficult to hold the job tight against the fence without it creeping forward and changing the angle of the mitre. You can, if you have this problem, overcome it by fixing abrasive paper to the mitre fence or the same job can be achieved by [putting in a panel pin and snipping it off slightly proud of the surface of the mitre fence. This locates the job nicely hut does leave a small mark in the job itself.

The fourth jig is the mitre trap proper.  This is the kind of thing you see in old engravings of cabinetmakers workshops. A mitre trap is used, though I must say that it hasn't found! much favour in my workshop, for planing to a finish, large mitres that would have been cut with a hand saw. The idea was the mitre would have been cut probably with a tenon saw using a mitre box and then trimmed to final shape using a bench plane or possibly a mitre plane on this rather odd looking contraption. I should say that all this faffing around with mitres has been greatly improved! in my workshop by the purchase of a mitre trimmer. This is a small guillotine that threatens to take the fingers off of any unfortunate craftsman venturing to come within five feet of it.

Diagram five which may ar maynot be present shows the mitre box, effectively this is the other half of the team that was used in days "the old days" to produce mitres. I have never had a great love affair for mitre boxes, mine have always been hugely inaccurate, probably because I didn't use them to best advantage. They are made in solid wood and liable to distortion and wear. The other disadvantage is that whilst not been terribly difficult to use, they are pretty uncomfortable and ungainly to operate, holding a small moulding down inside a corner of a mitre box is not a comfortable operation but it can do a good job if you approach it in the right frame of mind.

Next is a more contemporary jig; a router table. There is no doubt that small electric hand routers have revolutionised the craft of cabinet making. Many of us now use a router for doing what a entire box of moulding planes and power planes would have done for our fore fathers. With a good set of cutters and an inventive mind there is almost no limit to how a hand router can be jigged up to do the most complicated of operations. There is no doubt that to extend the use of hand router, a small router table is very useful. In my time I have seen very complex router tables with adjustable fences, adjustable guards, adjustable dust extraction systems. These wonderful contraptions turn a router into almost a mini spindle moulder.

In my workshop we have got two or three home made router tables usually developed for a specific job when a router had to be upside down for a very long time. But by far the most popular device is the most simple router table you could imagine. Literally a piece of MDF with a hole in it. The idea is that a router is attached to the underside of a piece of MDF with the base screws and router bit plunged through the MDF to give the desired cut and projection on the opposite side. Depending on the cutter you are using this will also give support to the job around the cutter. The size of MDF with vary according to your job but the favourite size seems to be about 12" by 18". It seems that most people in my shop have one or two of these "router tables" from past jobs that get adapted with different cutters. Eventually like the bench hook they get worn out. In operation the router table couldn't be most simple to use but I must admit it does rely upon the fact that we have proper cabinet makers benches with large bench vices. It is these vices that hold the router in the inverted position with the router table sat on the bench top. It is then quite a simple matter to clamp ancillary fences or additional supports for the job either directly to the router table or the adjoining bench area. The principle is that by keeping it simple by not having specially made fences and guidance system the router table is supremely adaptable it also has the advantage of being very cheap.

CRAFT OF CABINETMAKING NO 31 by David Savage in The Woodworker Magazine

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