Thinking about how to do this without using dog holes/MFTs... I have a t-slot track running along the face of my bench so if I add a second to the backside I could mount a Dashboard hinge there. Or even make my own bracket both sides where I could place a dog hole. At least then I can slide them around until they're square to the fence.
Yeah, that setup still feels a bit cumbersome to wrangle for my taste. I’d chase something simpler—less fiddling with adjustments, more rock-solid dependability to keep life easy.
I inherited an ancient family heirloom workbench and mostly parked it in the shop as decoration. But when big jobs ate up our space, we’d drag it out as an extra crosscut station. No way was I risking saw scars on that beauty, so we slapped on a quick MFT-style top for a dead-simple Benchdogs setup: a pair of them in the back as the fence, one to the right with spacers as a stop block, and two tall dogs to lock in the guide rail.
It took a minute to dial in, plus some trial-and-error saw handling to kill any rail wobble. But once humming, we could slice through MDF and plywood very reliably for about a hundred mid-size drawer panels.
With too much adjustability, I’d worry it’d drift over time from sheet bumps. Give me boring reliability any day!
To keep things even simpler, I’d skip the dog-hole pattern, fix the fence permanently to the back, and bolt something on where the guide rail registers at a perfect 90° angle—maybe a hinge or just stop blocks. Once that’s set, I’d think about repeatable fence stops for crosscuts; that could be anything simple, like a clamped wood scrap, or something fancier—whatever works.
The workflow would be like this:
• Clean up factory edge.
• Rip cuts with parallel guides.
• Use the MFT crosscut station or a rail square to square it up.
• Then register with the square edge to the fence stop and cut stuff to size.
