re: Rockler Bench Cookie Master Kit

I went back and forth on them for a week. This is what made me pull the trigger:

Benches are made of wood.

When you bring a piece of wood to another piece of wood, they slide.

This is why we have bench dogs, planing stops, vises, etc.

You don’t always need the staying power of the Hoover Dam, sometimes something with as little holding power as a rubber drawer liner is what you need. So why not just use some cheap drawer liner to interface between the two?

Well, in my experience, drawer liner requires a clear surface. Sometimes there is crap on my bench (by crap, I mean another project). How nice would it be to instead throw down some grippy hockey pucks so that I don’t have to move everything, or at least I have to move very little, because 4 hockey pucks take up less room than a long and wide drawer liner.

I have literally used drawer liner to plane before. I mean, it’s common sense, take a quarter sheet of plywood, slap it atop some horses, no need for a planing stop because there are no dog holes. Slap down some drawer liner, and the pressure of the plane is down and forward, and the downward force keeps the wood you are planing pressed into the liner.

I don’t think I will be planing atop the cookies, unless they prove exceptionally grippy. I got to feel a bench cookie when I was at a friends shop, and I don’t think they are up for that, but sanding, sure. Maybe even some light cabinet scraping. I will have to see.

I do know that for wood finishing they will come in handy. They ought to also motivate me to think about putting some T-track into my future bench.