The Bench Vice

It has been a busy day, full of mistakes. But all of them were recoverable from. To get started a have a picture of the vice I was attaching to the Carving Bench. The jaws need to be made from wood, so I took a Myrtle Wood block as shown, split it so I would have just over an inch on the outside jaws, flattened them and used double sided tape to put them back together. Then I marked the hole locations down from the top of the bench and drilled it out using my drill press. The pictures show the result, unfortunately I was 7/16" too high so I lowered them making the holes oval after I re-drilled and sanded the pieces.

I used clamps to hold the vice base plate under the table, then drilled and screwed the plate on. It looked great, then I went to cut a matching set of slots in the horizontal board between the legs and I ran into the hinges. So I took the plate off, moved it to the left 1.5" and tried again. You can see where the jaw boards are set on the shafts (still loose), some of the cut for the bars. So with some quick playing with the vice, my boards were still ¼" low, and the vice would not close and clamp because you need at least 3" of jaw between the outside plate and the inside to account for the cut of the main screw.




This was not going well.

Enjoy and be careful of the splinters.