Lee Valley Veritas Parf Dog Enhancement

[Jim Becker]

I've been working more and more using a "perforated work surface" and that's likely to continue. In my case, it's a Festool MFT and will soon also include my current project that includes a matching worktop with 20mm holes on 96mm spacing. These work surfaces don't replace my primary workbench for heavier hand-tool work, but are a welcome augmentation of it. The dogs I own for my workbench are 3/4" focused, so they are not particularly useful for these other worktops. Now Festool has a very nice set of dogs, but I don't own them, and there are attractive third party options at even more attractive cost. I recently bought some of the Veritas Parf Dogs (the shorter version) and they happen to have a tapped hole bored through the center of them. They are tapped for M8 threads. As round dogs, they are great as they are. But one of the features of the Festool version is that they have a wider, flat surface that can be used to support the end of a board when one is doing things to the other end, such as cutting the mortise for a domino fastener.

Since I bought four of these nice SS dogs (for $14.95 a pair), I decided to convert two of them to a format similar to the Festool version. The metric bins at Home Depot provided the M8 Allen head bolts and my scrap bin provided a nice piece of mahogany to make the additions. A few minutes at the drill press after milling the material to 25mm/1" square was all it took. Honestly, this was a 10-15 minute project if you take away the mistake I made when cutting, um...the first two apart with the angles on the wrong side. LOL

The lip on the Parf Dog is 10mm in height, so I bored a recess on what would be the bottom side of the workpiece support addition to allow it to sit flush to the table. I didn't have a 25mm forstner bit, so I used a 35mm version...it didn't matter much as long as it was large enough for the steel dog to get in there. A tiny through hole was bored on the center so that the required drilling on the other side would line up exactly on that center.

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The workpiece was turned over and a rebate for the bolt head was created using a 9/16" forstner bit...nothing was changed on the DP setup so that all the drilling stayed in the same centerline. The drilling was completed by swapping out to a 5/16" drill bit, which was the closest I had to the required through hole for the M8 bolts.

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Finally, I marked up for cutting the individual pieces off the longer stock. It worked out to a nice 40º angle and those cuts were done at the CMS. A little sanding of the edges with 220 and bolting things together competed this nice addition to my bench hardware.

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[Ben Rivel]

Not a bad idea.

BUT, have you seen the new Parf Super Dogs?! LINK

[Bryan Lisowski]

Jim good idea. Peter Parfitt who designed the dogs, did the same thing in a few of his videos, I think he called them dog hats, but generally used on the taller dogs, but the lower profile you did is great.

[Jim Becker]

Ben, yes I've seen Peter's "Super Dogs". I haven't found a need for the taller ones at this point, but one never knows when a new opportunity to, um...spend money...comes along. LOL

Bryan, I didn't know about the "dog hats" name, but I only recently discovered Peter's videos and I'm sure I'll come across that term at some point. It absolutely is a fitting description, too. My impetus for the project came from watching how Timothy Wilmots uses his Festool dogs to support workpieces at his bench when using the Domino on the ends, etc. I didn't want to spend the money for the Festool version. This low dog setup is perfect for that kind of use.

[Jim Dwight]

seems like a good idea to me. I have some plastic pieces for a workmate that seem to work OK as stops in 20mm holes. But this works too.

[Jim Becker]

Jim, I used a couple of my old Veritas brass dogs with the little spring on the side successfully a month or so ago in a pinch, but that wasn't an ideal situation since they are made for 3/4" holes, rather than 20mm which is just a hair under 13/16". Only the spring and the plastic material guards kept them from falling through...