In my shop I have the Performax shop system from Menards. In this set up, I have 3 of their workbenches. These benches are pretty nice; they are about 5 1/2 feet long and 2 feet wide and have a 1″ thick MDF top, which makes for a very nice work environment.
What I always ended up doing was just using some bar clamps and clamping my work pieces to the table. This is simply just a pain in the ass.
That’s where the Kreg bench dogs and clamps come in.
These bench dogs and clamps all fit inside of a standard 3/4″ hole, which makes things easier for us. The hardest part of this is picking the distance between the holes. For this I decided to do 8″ in each direction. This gives me plenty of space to work and allows me to add more later, if I find that I need them.
First I started in the lower left hand corner of the table and marked out the first hole at 4″ from the table ends. This became my starting point; from here I used a square, a 24″ straight edge and a 48″ straight edge to start making marks every 8″ in each direction.
Once I had the holes all marked and squared, I picked out a 3/4″ spade bore bit from my Irwin bit collection.
Now comes the scary part, drilling a bunch of holes into a perfectly good workbench. Before I did, I double-checked all of my marks to make sure they are square and are all in line with one another. Now, it’s time to drill out 24 holes.
This only took me about 10 minutes to do, the key is to take your time and make sure that your drill is level when you make the holes. Once done, I just used my shop vac to clean up all the excess dust.
After I cleaned up the table, I took my Ryobi orbital sander with some 220 grit sandpaper and gave the holes a light sanding to remove any of the excess wood left from the bore bit. MDF tends to leave some large spirals of wood after it’s drilled out.
The next step was to test my new clamps and bench dogs to see if they worked!
And they did, they worked perfectly! In fact, I think I may have to add bench dog holes to my other two tables.
Hope you enjoyed this post! Let me know what you think in the comments below!