MatchFit Work Horse Accessories - 369

Hey folks, hopefully you're all having a great day today. In the last video I made this match fit workhorse and in this video I'm going to cover all of the accessories that we made for it. And I say we because this is a design collaboration with my friend Mike over at Taylor Toolworks and if you're interested in a set of plans I do have them for both the workhorse as well as the nine major accessories that I'm going to show you today. There's more that I'm going to show you but some of the smaller stuff is like stop blocks and wedges. There's no need to make a plan for stuff like that. But we're going to go over a bunch of the stuff. I'm not going to show you the build process because there are so many pieces and it's just basic stuff like I said. So there's no need to show all that. It's pretty much self-explanatory accessories. With that being said let me bring you in closer and show you the difference of the pieces because some are Mike's, some are mine. The species of choice for all of this is Southern Yellow Pine and you'll see two distinct looks here. This one is finished with Bullard linseed oil. This one is natural. All of Mike's, Mike sent me some of his pieces as version one I guess you could say. All of Mike's are finished with boiled linseed oil. All of mine are left natural. I chose to leave mine natural because I don't see myself using this for a bunch of glue ups and if I'm not using it for a bunch of glue ups I want a natural wood to wood friction here rather than having a finish of some kind making it just a little bit more slippery. Now if you are gluing stuff up I would recommend a finish. Boiled linseed oil like this is a good option or Danish oil and that'll allow the glue squeeze out to be easily popped off. But that's the difference in color here. So all of Mike's are basically version one. All of mine are version two. Either direct duplicates or a slight change for whatever reason. First and most obvious accessory are these end stops. It's literally just one piece of wood with a couple holes drilled in it and I routed a round over here just for a decorative edge. These little knobs allow adjustment up or down. Leave them slightly lower than these tracks so they don't interfere when they're not needed. You can still use these tracks but of course you can slide it up as an end stop for various different tasks and situations and such. Just stop the material from going over the edge. This next accessory isn't specific to the workhorse but it is something that I recommend everybody make if you have the MatchFit hardware system. It's what I'm calling a moxen block. You can call it basically anything you want but it's literally a block of wood with a bunch of grooves all over the place in various different locations. The reason I'm calling it a moxen block is because a moxen vise is typically a twin screw vise that is elevated above your other work table of some kind. You clamp it to the work table or the work bench or whatever to elevate your material and then it also gives you typically wider clamping options with no obstructions down below like a single screw vise. Well that's basically what this is. You have two grooves down here at the bottom so you can clamp this to basically anything and then you have all kinds of options for a mobile clamping station, however you want. So not specific to this workhorse but I highly recommend you make one and if you do try and find some wood, hardwood preferably, that has some nice tight growth rings and then glue it up like that so they're kind of canceling each other out and therefore you'll be left with a pretty darn stable useful item that will last you forever. You can put one of these MatchFit clamps on any face of the workhorse and you don't necessarily need a vise jaw for wider stuff like this but you will get better traction, you'll get a better grip if you do have a vise jaw. So this will work just fine but adding another piece of material, this vise jaw, with some cork rubber on the inside will increase grip and decrease the chances of these clamps slipping or the material slipping as you interact with the board. I don't know why, I'm sure there's a scientific reason why as far as the force distribution of these screws in one specific location versus this cork rubber on it. Sure we'll go with that but the specifics aren't that important. What matters is you will get a much better grip with a vise jaw like this as opposed to without the vise jaw. So a couple things to note about this one. This one's Mike's, there's no need for me to remake another one when this one works just fine. However, in the plan, I do have this right slot or one of the slots extended quite a bit further so that regardless of the width of the material here, you can put the clamp in front of the material. You do not want to use these clamps where there's an unsupported gap between the foot of this clamp and then the screw head of the clamp because what that'll do is it'll actually pull out the foot of this clamp out of the dovetail slot. So you want to have these clamps sandwiched over the material at all times. So a wider slot right here will allow you to get thinner, or I guess not as wide material, but it'll allow you to get on top of the material having the same jaw versus having a wide jaw and a more narrow jaw. This next accessory is what we're calling a wedge stop, and I'm going to show you both version one as well as version two so you can get the idea and then also see the correction or the improvement. So what you have here is three, that's actually four pieces of wood, right? So you have this top angled wedge piece, you have a small short wedge right here glued in place, and then you have a rectangle across the entire bottom. On this side over here, to help keep this flat, you see on this angle a spline glued in, a hardwood spline glued all the way through and then pinned with dowels. Also on here is another match fit slot, which I'll show you in just a second. Now as far as this wedge, how do you keep it tracking, there's another spline right here and that's the actual problem with version one. So in this case, this wedge is supposed to slide out and push back in, sliding along this angled face, right? The material used for the spline was maple, and the material here is obviously southern yellow pine. The problem is, this pine has contracted, it has shrunk a little bit, at a much greater rate than this maple. So this is completely locked in here, I've tried to beat it out, tried to really wrench on it, you'll see the damage done to this hole right here, this hole is so you can pull it out with your finger. But I can't get it out because this piece of pine has shrunk down and clamped down on top of the spline. So if you want to put a spline in here, which I found out is not really necessary in the plans, I do have it shown with a spline, but if you do want to put a spline in here, make sure that you use the same species of wood, pine, pine, pine, and that will reduce the chances of it really binding up on it, because it should expand and contract at the same rate at that point. So I literally cannot get this out, so I was forced to remake another one, and oh, also this match fit slot on this side is for the locking mechanism, so it locks to the end stop. Let me put this on here real quick. So this will clamp on top of the end stop and clamp it in place. Let me show you that real quick. The end stop comes up, I'll just make it loose for right now. This slides over, and let me loosen this up a little bit, back these out. So it hugs onto the end stop. I'll tighten the end stop in place, and then I can tighten this down on top of the end stop, and it really locks this accessory to the workbench. It is not going anywhere. Here's the view from the operator's angle. Of course, this is supposed to slide out, I can't get it to slide out, but these two faces remain in contact, so as you slide this out, this gap increases, allowing you to put a piece of material in here, you bump the wedge forward and it locks it in place. So what you're doing is immobilizing a piece on edge for you to do work to the edge of the material. And here is version two, a very similar setup. Instead of a hole on the wedge to put your finger in and retract it, I put a proud stop or another block of wood right here, pinned with some dowels, so you can hit this with a mallet and pop the wedge out. On this side, we do still have that same spline to help keep this flat over time, but instead of a match fit dado, the dovetail slot routed in this end grain to attach it to the end stop, I opted for just a simple slot on the top to use a clamp. And there's pros and cons to both methods. Let me put this on the bench and I'll show you. I'm going to stand at the back side of the workhorse so you can see everything from the operator's perspective. If you were standing in front of this, this is what you would see. Version one, we're not going to clamp to this end stop anymore, so I can remove this. But we are still going to use the end stop. We're going to use the end stop with one of these clamps. So now, put version two in place, push it up against the end stop so we have a physical stop in this direction. I'm going to push it this way up against the clamp and we have a physical stop in two directions. Then we can clamp it in place. Now from here, because we have a higher spot right here rather than a hole, we can bump the wedge out. And this is the way it'll work. It's going to slide up against this face, increasing and decreasing this width right here. So if you wanted to use thin material, you put your wedge in place, give it a gentle tap, and it immobilizes this piece. You want to use a thicker material, pop this out, move your material, and put something in that's thicker. Now this one, I bumped it into the angled face over here first. So now, bump the wedge, and this is immobilized. So you can make other accessories like this one is, held in place with other accessories. This is a sliding deadman and you've probably seen it on a lot of rubo-style workbenches. And basically you have a tongue down here at the bottom and a tongue here at the top. You have a groove on the lower shelf and a groove underneath the workbench top. And they're sized in such a way that there's a much deeper cavity or much deeper groove dado on the top side so you can lift it into place, set it down into this bottom shelf, and it still interact and allow you to slide back and forth. This one is from Mike's. It's slightly different dimensions than mine. This one, very similar in design, but just a slightly different shape. I chose for my center section to be kind of like a comic necktie. That's what I was thinking of when I cut this out. His is a little bit more traditional looking. Either way they do the exact same thing. Again, much longer tongue at the top so that it can be lifted up into place and then set down on this groove. Now you can slide it back and forth. One thing to note is that this bottom shelf is removable in this design. So when you install all this, you need to use a square of some kind to make sure that this is perpendicular. This piece right here is perpendicular to this top surface. Once you have the position of this shelf located front and back so that this is perpendicular, put some pencil lines on these horizontal stretchers on these legs so that way every time you set the shelf back in place, every time you reassemble this, you just line it up with that pencil line and you know that the Sliding Deadman should work. So there's something to note there. Now as far as the Sliding Deadman, you can do all kinds of stuff with it. Clamping, but I guess the most common thing that I would use it for is just a stop block. On a big Rubo workbench or a big workbench with a Sliding Deadman, a shaker workbench, whatever, the front face of the workbench is flush with the front of the leg. So you can put like an entire door up here and the whole point of the Deadman is to hold that weight. In this case, these legs are splayed out at an angle, so the front face of the workbench is behind the front face of these legs. So you can't put an entire door up here. That's just a limitation to the size and the design and the form factor of this project. But you can still use it for stop blocks for various other things. And the thing that I am constantly seeing with this is, let's just say you're using a bunch of the same length material, you're doing a bunch of drawers and you have a bunch of pin boards or tail boards or whatever, it's going to be handy to have a stop so that you put your material in the same spot at every time for whatever task you're working on. So it kind of gives you an extra hand. You can set it right here and let gravity, you know, not worry about gravity pulling this down rather, and then use your other hand to get your clamps in place. So this is a very handy stop block system for that particular task. You can use it with stop blocks as well as, ouch, as well as clamps, obviously. So handy little accessory that I don't think would be used tremendously often, but there's a reason why they're so popular on workbenches. This is obviously a tool tray. Very basic in design. You can see the joinery. If I show you this top view, we've got rabbets where my thumbs are and then dados down here where my fingers are. There's dados right here and here for more blocks that are used to put the match fit hardware through to attach it to the grooves on the back of the workhorse. There are some splines right here to separate some tools and then there's a bunch of holes for various whatevers. So this is Mike's version one. Version two is basically identical except after I got mine done, I drilled the holes in different locations and then realized that it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to put the holes in the front side. Oops, this side's the slightly larger holes. It doesn't make much sense at all to put the holes in the front side because then you're blocking access to whatever you have back here. So I just drilled another row of holes on the back side. And as of making this workhorse and this accessory and this video, I have yet to update the plans to have holes on the back side. However, it's just holes. Drill some holes. So I do need to update this. Some of the cool things, like I said, are the holes for pencils, marking gauge, awl, whatever you want. But these slots here at the front are pretty cool too because they fit a wide blade square. If you're a hand tool user, it should fit most hand saws like so. If you've got some chisels, which everybody does, then you have some chisels, slots and dividers. Now in the plans, like I said, they don't have these holes in the back and I have some specific spacing right here for these splines. But really, the construction, just get the construction done and then put any accessory splines or holes wherever you want. It's obvious that these aren't set in stone locations. You can put them anywhere. So if you want your chisels over here, you put your chisels over here. If you have a slightly wider saw back, right, your saw is a little bit thicker, we'll take that measurement first and then adjust this offset right here accordingly so that it fits your saw if it's a wider saw. But the cool thing is, this really makes it a handy, convenient hand tool station at this workhorse. So if you don't have an entire shop setup or don't have an entire shop space that you can allocate to woodworking, you can set this workhorse up against the wall in the corner of a shop. It doesn't take up that much space and you can have like a dedicated joinery station. You don't need a tremendous amount of work surface to cut some joints, right? You can do all of your joinery cutting on this and then do your assembly on some other platform or even the floor really. So this brings a lot of hand tool functionality to a much smaller space, which I really like. This is what I'm calling a chamfer cradle. It's just a block of wood with some V-notches cut in it, various different sizes. You have a larger one here at the top in this example and then a shorter one or a smaller one down here at the bottom. So if you're using larger material, you can use this side. If your material is too small where it's getting buried and lost in here, you flip this over around or end for end and you have this smaller V-notch up here at the top. Both ends have a screw in them so you can adjust this screw up or down to act as a physical stop for your material to not go forward. Now the whole point of these V-notches is so you can have your material set up like a V and you can plane a chamfer on the opposite edge. Now a cool thing like this is, the way I see this being used most frequently is, let's just say you have some table legs that are square, one inch square legs, and you want to cut a tapered chamfer all the way down to the bottom so the bottom turns into an octagon rather than a square or rectangle. Well, this is a way that you could very easily do that. But once you flip it around to get to the opposite side near that chamfer up here or down here at the bottom, if that screw is too low, it'll slide right over the top. So that's why you can use a screw rather than like a dowel. So you back that screw out to get to the center of the leg or center of whatever material you're working with. And again, smaller groove on one side, larger groove on the other side for larger material. You can use it right up against an end stop because you are pushing with a plane. You don't necessarily have to clamp it in place. But because you've got clamping options everywhere, if you really wanted to, you could clamp this right to the front of the workhorse and leave the entire top surface of your workhorse free for other material. When cutting dovetail joints, I cut tails first. So the next step after the tails are cut is to put the pin board vertical in a vise and then position the tail board on top so that everything's lined up perpendicular in all directions. The sides are lined up, the faces are perpendicular, and then immobilize both pieces so nothing shifts while you mark them and transfer the tail geometry to the pin board. An accessory to make this a little bit easier is just a 90 degree block of some kind. There are various different ways you can make these for various different table setups. But in this case, this one right here is Mike's or version number one. And while it works really, really well, the problem I found is you have to take the hardware completely out in order to put this onto the top of the workhorse because the legs are splayed out just a little bit. So if this was in the grooves, of course, the grooves are off because our workhorses are slightly different. But if this was in the groove, I couldn't slide it any further anymore this way because the leg's in the way. So I can't get this off of the workhorse. And if I can't get it off this way, then I have to take the hardware out for both of them. So the solution to that is to make this much shorter and put both knobs up at the top. So that's what I did here. This one, as you can see, basically the exact same thing. This front leg is shorter. Both knobs are up at the top. Can you see? Yeah, you can see. I've got the end stop down. And if I can line this up and slide this on, that was easier than I thought it would be, then it'll slide into place. Because I have some slop in these holes to make this a little bit less finicky to get in place, there's some adjustment here. So you have to push this up against the front face of the workhorse and then tighten these down. That'll get the registration where it should be. Now this is solid wood. So one obvious thing that would make this even better is to use something that's a little bit more stable, like plywood. But for just transferring tails to pins, I think this will work just fine. Now one thing that I did is I also put a clamp slot right here so that, actually my clamp is backwards. Let me spin this clamp around. So that you can put a clamp in place while using this accessory, put a clamp right there, and then you can very easily line stuff up and clamp it in place. So let's just say we use these two pieces of wood. Let's just say that this is the tail board. It's not. Let's just say that's the tail board. Put it in place, line the pin board up, and stop it vertically. Clamp it in place. And then of course on this piece on the top, you can put another clamp right here and clamp it in place. And now you have these two pieces perfectly lined up, immobilized with clamps. Nothing is going to slip and you can very accurately take your time to transfer the geometry from the tail board to the pin board. Accessory number nine in the plans is a small wedge stop it. And I did not build one for myself because I just don't see myself using it. I don't use a lot of small, narrow stock all the time. But if you do, something like this, very simple, could be pretty handy actually. So on Mike's setup, he has it set to where it clamps to the front face of his workhorse. In my revision, the one that's included in the plans does not clamp to the front face of the workhorse because I didn't see a need to grab another one of these match fit hardware pieces when you already have a bunch of these clamps anyway. Typically, you're going to have some of these that aren't going to be used with this process, right? So what I have is a notch cut out right here so that you use the end stop to stop it this way. This straddles around the clamp over here and then you just clamp it down in place. Very similar to the larger wedge stop that I showed just a few minutes ago. So again, I didn't build one because I don't see myself using this a lot. But I do see its value for somebody who uses small, thin stock all the time. So the whole point of this is to mobilize two different directions. If you're using smaller, thin stock, smaller than this, of course you can immobilize it in this direction by using the end stop, but you still have wiggle in this way. So with this small wedge stop set in place and secured and not moving anywhere, not only do you have a stop in the forward direction, but you're also immobilizing it this way. So you're not going to get much wiggle there. So again, I see it being useful for very specific purposes. Someone who uses some small, thin stock all the time. I don't. That's why I didn't build it. The rest of these accessories I did not include in the plan because they're just so basic. They don't require plans. For example, a stop block. It's a block of wood with a hole in it. Obvious use. So let's just say we want to stop this piece of wood from moving around. Well, we can stop it first by using this end stop to restrict it in one direction. We can take that a step further by adding one of these stop blocks. So I'll put this in this track on the backside and clamp it down or tighten it down. I'll slide this end stop up, tighten it down. So now we're stopping it from going in that direction and we're stopping it from wiggling this way. So if you are right here where the operator is, where the camera is, and you're putting force typically forward and to the left if you're right-handed, then this should work. But you still have a little bit of wiggle over here. So you can take this a step further by using what's called a doze foot. This is very common in a hand tool arsenal. And it's a 90 degree notch on the end of a board so it fits around the corner of a piece of wood. So you can take this a step further by setting it over here. I've already moved some of this stuff out of the way as far as this hand tool or this tool well goes. Of course the tool well can be removed. But this slides in place and can be clamped down. This is kind of in the way in this exact location but it doesn't necessarily always end up like this. But now you have access to the entire top of the material and you have a stop in both left and right direction so it can't wiggle back and forth and you're stopping it from going away from you. But it does not completely immobilize the material. So this will be handy if you're batching out a bunch of the same task on the same size piece. You can slide your material out, put the new piece in and quickly immobilize it without having to mess with any clamps or anything like that. Okay but what if you want to completely immobilize this and stop it from wiggling around. This is wangy by the way and I'm trying to do my best to barely touch it because I know a splinter is about to happen. To take this a step further though you can get this out of the way and you can use one of these small low profile blocks. So let me actually slide this off the other side of the workhorse where you can't see. And this is just a basic block. There's nothing to this. It's an inch and a half square. We have a low profile handle so it sits real low inside of a counterbore and you're not having a lot of thickness stick up and of course the same match fit hardware down at the bottom. The difference between this and just a regular stop block is that these two faces where my fingers are at are angled at about 10 degrees, 5-10 degrees. And these two faces where my thumbs are are 90 degrees. So those angled faces are good to use in conjunction with wedges. So here is a wedge, obvious wedge shape, wider on one side and narrower on the other side. But this angled face has that same matching taper so it kind of locks in place with this little stop block. So let me take this doe's foot out of the way and there it is, I got my splinter. My goodness, you can't even look at winging the wrong way but I'll get the splinter. I'll get that later. So with this angled face in place, or angled block in place, you can see how it works like so. Tighten this little knob up and now if you want to really immobilize this, a little tap. And now this is locked in place and it's not going anywhere. You want to get rid of it or you want to get it out of the way. If you have a mallet that will reach, you can do that or use another piece of wood to knock it out very gently and there you go. Wedges, tapered faces, angles, they are your friend. Locks it in place really, really solidly. So again, these aren't included in the plans but it's just basic stuff. Let me go ahead and get a ruler or tape measure real quick and give you the exact dimensions of these. This particular wedge is six and an eighth long, so I might as well just say a six inch long wedge. The wide side is one and seven eighths, the narrow side is one and one quarter of an inch, so whatever that angle is. And then the exact angle right here on this face is about ten degrees, whatever that angle is, whatever angle you put on this face, put on the side of this face. Now I initially said that these blocks are inch and a half, inch and a half square. They're not. They are actually two inches square in both directions. And all of these pieces are five eighths of an inch in thickness. So plans aren't necessary for these small accessories but I did want to actually show them to you because they are pretty darn handy. One final bonus feature of this whole MatchFit workhorse is that you don't necessarily have to build the entire base. If you have a solid platform or a solid table of some kind, you can build the platform of the workhorse and just clamp it in place. Clamp it anywhere you have a solid structure, just like the Moxon block. That's it for this video. If you're interested in a set of plans for the workhorse as well as all the accessories minus the very basic ones I showed at the end, I do have them available on my website. It's 21 pages, covers everything in detail, everything you need to build this entire setup. That's on my website. If you're interested in this MatchFit hardware, I do have a coupon code you can use. It's down in the description if you're watching this on YouTube. If you're on my website, first off, thank you for watching on my website. Watching on my website helps me tremendously. As a matter of fact, about 10 times as much as just watching it on YouTube. But I do appreciate that. There's a coupon code on my website if you're watching there. If you haven't been to my website, go to jayscustomcreations.com slash newsletter and sign up for my email newsletter so you don't miss anything that I publish on both my YouTube channels as well as just the random sporadic stuff that I do publish on my website. That's it. You guys take care. Have a great day. I'll talk to you in the next video.