After reading a lot on this forum I ended up with a LV BU jack and jointer along with LN 4 smoother. I knew I slowly wanted to get into hand planes and really got a chance to use them today.
I have a 20-year-old Hoffman Hammer bench that I bought not really knowing what I was getting into. As the years passed and my interest waned the bench got used for other things (mostly to store crap on! ). Now I am back into woodworking and decided to rehab the bench. I tightened everything stripped off the vices and cleaned everything up. The bench is surprisingly pretty sturdy.
When it came time to flatten the top the planes worked flawlessly. However I must have set the plane to deep and got a pretty big gouge. A recent Fine woodworking article said to use epoxy and sawdust for small drill holes in your bench (sadly I have those too) and figured I could do one of three things: try that, use a Dutchman, or just simply smooth it out the best I can as it does not impact the overall flatness. Any thoughts?
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My second question for the group is ways to improve the bench. I've read Schwarz's workbench books and I'm going to try and laminate some maple to the stretchers and legs so that the top, legs and stretcher are coplanar. Dog holes will follow. However, I"m not really sure what to do to the top. Should I add some round dog holes and if so where? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Sorry, pics taken with IPhone and for some reason they upload rotated.
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