Now that I have a small collection of handplanes, I need to make my
bench a little more planing friendly. Currently I use my vise and
benchdogs to hold a piece of wood to be planed. However, because I
built the bench before I fell in love with handtools, the benchdog
holes are not in the right place and I find my self not tall enough a
lot.

Anyway I thought I might add a mechanism to clamp a wood stop across
it lengthways. Not too difficult.

Then someone told me about Japanese trestle beams. A search of
rec.woodworking didn't reveal any pictures. It did reveal that there's
a chapter in Landis' "The Workbench Book" but I'm not going to buy a
book just for 13 pages I may not even build.

I also learned that Fine Woodworking issue #54 (9/01/1985) has an
article "Body Mechanics and the Japanese Beams" by Drew Langston. I go
to the FWW home page and try to get that issue (for $3.50) but they
don't seem to archive back that far.

Popular Woodworking also had an article in issue #35 (2/1/1987).

Bob Bench Page shows one but somehow I don't think master Japanese
woodworkers use something like that....
http://www.terraclavis.com/bws/benches.htm fourth picture down.

So does anyone in this group have a picture, plans, etc.? Does anyone
have opinions about these beams/benches?

My intuition says that a bench about knee high with someway to hold
planks down would be perfect for planing and not take up a lot of
room. Perfect to complement my current imperfect bench.