Home Brew Tools - Chunky Vice

Nomad

I don't have a decent woodworking bench (and the crappy bench I do have is covered in oil painting gear), so I decided I needed a decent vice that can be clamped to my portable Clarke folding workbench.

Here's what I made...

http://imgur.com/uDx4yCL.jpg

It's based on the Tiranti carver's vice which can be seen in recent videos by Crimson Guitars, but doesn't have the big bolt going down through the base of the vice to secure it to the bench and allow for swivelling. I'm not into knocking holes in my benches, preferring to clamp to them when I need a holder-upper of some sort. (There's a third G-clamp at the far corner which can't be seen in the photo.)

It's 500mm long to match the width of the bench, and the overall height is 250mm. The base is 18mm birch ply, the long bit with the slots is maple (which happened to be a suitable size) and the rest is beech. The jaws are 120mm wide and 50mm thick, and are faced with 3mm thick cow hide (non-shiny tooling leather). The facings are held on with double-sided tape which should make them easy to renew when needed. The fixed front jaw is joined to the maple part with a big finger joint and there are two 10mm dia steel pins running through the full width of the joint, and glued in with epoxy. Finished with the usual boiled linseed oil.

The lead screw is a Veritas tail vice screw from Axminster. The moving jaw has 5/8" square aluminium bars fixed to the bottom edges on the inside. The fit is pretty close and the moving jaw does a very good job of staying vertical. The action is very smooth - easy to spin the screw in and out with one finger.

Max jaw opening with the rails fully engaged is 215mm, and it gets to 265mm with the big nut thingy inside still fully on the threads (at which point the rails extend out the back by 50mm). From the tops of the jaws to the lead screw is about 105mm.

The joint is still a weak point and it would be easy to apply a massive force to it (the torque is multiplied by the screw, and increased again due to leverage becuase the jaws, screw and joint are separated). I decided to be a little careful when tightening, but it turns out that it grips really well with a quite moderate turn of the screw. I just jointed two halves of a guitar body blank in it, one end in the vice, the other sitting on a couple of blocks, and it was soild. It's really intended for carving necks, though - on that bench, it's a bit high for planing. The bench is 850mm high, so the top of the vice is at 1.1m, which should put a neck at a comfortable height for using spokeshaves and rasps.

Overall cost in parts and materials was about £50 (half of which was the lead screw).