Journal

Shop Bents are Gone to the Dogs

I received a letter from Jerry in New Jersey this week and wanted to share it with you-

Jerry made himself some ‘shop bents‘ following plans from my first book, Made by Hand.

Jerry started by making bents for wood storage, the same thing I’ve been using mine for these last 6 years,

but he also found another use for this design.

With a slight alteration, he made a great little adjustable jumping fence for his dog!

I absolutely love this idea~

being an animal lover, I think this is the best use of this design I’ve seen yet.

Thanks again for sharing this with us Jerry;

and a great job on the bents!

It looks like Darci likes hers too!

Tom,

Finally I get to reply! I work at a  nursery and I had several wood working projects to get done before I could pursue this.  

I will attach the bents pics and some of the “bents design” jumping set up for Darci (a Yorky-Bishon hybrid) .

I use the bents constantly to keep track of wood for different projects. They are so flexible in size that they can be used in many ways.  The bottom crosspiece allows for two levels of sorting.  

In the pictures they are holding parts for the 17th Century wooden stool I am working on. The wood is red oak from my property and riven to rough size.  I use a lot of red oak because I had some trees taken down and then had the logs milled.  One tree I saved for splitting out some wood too.  I like the flecking that red oak has and try to feature it when possible.  

For the cross pieces I made through tenons and left them a bit proud.

For the jumping bar, I followed the same design but made the crosspiece with a loose tenon and used wedges to hold it together  (so it can be disassembled)  the cross bar is of course loose and angled to fit in the notches.  

 Jerry

PS. I live in New Jersey (at the “Jersey Shore” — yes, Hurricane Sandy did reach up to my house, but stopped short of flooding my workshop. )

~ CLICK THIS LINK TO SEE A QUICK VIDEO OF DARCI IN ACTION ! ~