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christopher,
do you prefer metal vise screws?

Yeah, that's a pretty job all right.

Seems to me that the reason the bench bows out is because of the way the vise works... with the spacing block at the bottom, the vise will really only be able to pinch at the top. If the vise stock is too thick, the bench will flex. If the stock is thin enough to flex a little bit, I think it'll spring a little bit, at which point it will basically be pinching the front edge of the bench.

Gee, if only there were some way to get the bottom part of the leg vise to move in and out at the same rate, so that it's not pinching at the top, but instead the whole unit slides in and out in a fairly parallel fashion.

Kees,

I like both metal and wood. The metal are inexpensive, robust and mark your work with grease. The wooden ones are expensive, robust enough and don't mark your work with grease.

So it's a budget vs. grease equation.

Chris

I've been waiting for this post, Chris. Glad to see someone sharing their sliding vise design. Great info on the very aspect I have been thinking about. This makes life easier. :-)

Don’t raise the bridge drop (lower!?) the water…
Here is my thinking,
Making a root will reduce the mass on the bench. If I learnt something from your book is mass is good for benches. So instead of routing a groove underneath the top you may add a rail attached with some screws to it in order to create the guide for the sliding vise. If the vise is to be added from the scratch, when building the bench, then the first board of the bench top should be 5” instead of been 4” as the rest of the others.
Does this make sense?

Regards,


P. Massabie

Pedro,

The only downside to your approach is that the rail will occasionally interfere with clamping. The structure you describer is similar to the one I used when adding my first sliding deadman. It does do the job, but there's a slight cost.

Chris

I can guess that it might but it also may add an additional clamping surface if the rail is made flush with the front of the bench, and with a square section deep enough to let the clamp "bite"
For my enlightenment, whith whitch kind of clamping the rail will interfere?

Regards,

P Massabié

Chris:
I am very impressed with the innovation, reseach and publishing you are doing for fine woodworking. I am glad I stubbled upon your site(s), blog(s) and magazine.

I am not sure how this would fit with your current design, but for my next bench I plan to add a clamping strip to the front edge of the bench. It seems that a 2 inch by 2 inch lip on the underside of the bench would provide a clamping surface for any size work piece, up to the full length of the bench. this, combined with a vertically mounted piece of pipe and part of a pipe clamp would give vertical and horizontal support to a work piece. I use the pipe clamp support now, and it works well, though i had to add a bit of wood to the face of the clamp to get some extra reach. It hangs from a pipe hanger (check the plumbing section at your local home store) screwed to the underside of the bench. I haven't tried the clamping strip though. If anyone has I'd be interested in some feedback before I build the bench...

Hmmm...maybe I need to have one of those too! LOL!

Well, at one point, I was planning on making such a vise to enter into a toolmaking contest on one of the WW message boards. Alas, too much to do, I missed the deadline. So, I'm sharing the ideas that I had...

When I look at the sliding leg vise, with the pin style bottom adjustment, what I really see is a really big, partly mechanical hand screw. The only real difference between the vise displayed here and a big hand screw is that a hand screw uses threaded rod for the lower adjustment, instead of a mechanical pin setup. This means the following to me:

-A Lee valley twin screw vise mechanism MIGHT be worth adapting to this project, as it would eliminate the need for the bottom adjustment part that you'd have to bend over to get to. That said, I've heard Chris say in lectures that the twin screw vise breaks after a while of being regularly racked in such a way, so I moved on to thinking of other ways to go about doing this as a project.

-Pillaging an existing hand screw clamp is a quick and dirty way of going about this, though it's not really a full sized vise. You could make new wooden pieces, with the back one going down to ride on the sliding deadman rail, and up to the back of an apron, or into a groove in the underside of the bench, and make the outer piece of wood however long you want, and with whatever capacity. Just remember to have the length between the upper screw and the top of the bench shorter than the distance bewteen the two screws, for leverage reasons, and lay the dowel nuts out in a similar fashion to the way they're drilled into the hand screw, so the wood doesn't split under tension.

For that matter, you could even build one into the right side of an existing sliding deadman. This will give vertical hold ability to assist in positioning while you futz with the hand screw. I also debated the virtues of mounting such a thing at an angle, similar to the leg vise on the english bench, to make the capacity of the handscrew into a moot point.

-I thought about pillaging a Lee Valley Twin screw setup, and making large wooden dowels in lieu of dowel nuts, to go into a HUGE home made handscrew-derived clamping setup. Because a handscrew has to be able to pivot, and the twin screw vise hardware is not made to pivot, I was going to have to make pivoting mounts for the hardware. I also thought about going with a low profile handwheel for lower screw adjustment, to allow clearance for the normal wooden vise handle to swing. This was the intended penultimate design for my entry into this contest. I had designs sketched out, but that was really as far as I'd gotten. And really, I'm more interested in getting the idea out there anyway.

After reading the entries in here, it became really clear to me that such a vise would work best if the jaws were made PERFECTLY parallel to the face of the bench, and that's hard to do with a pin-based lower adjustment system, because the lower adjustment system has set points that it will adjust to. If the top is pinching before the lower section, then the bottom of the skirt or groove is going to get pulled forward by the vise. The twin screw vise mechanism sounded great for this at first shine, becuase it wold hold the jaw parallel to the front at all times. But Chris has had other experiences. Hence the twin-but-not-connected-screw idea.

I don't know, not having made one, if this is something I'd really use as a vise, or just a way to hold down the other end of a long piece of work, so I don't know if it's really necessary to make it a full width vise... though such an over-built monstrosity really does have its appeals.

I think if I were going to go after this for real, if I didn't have a need for yet another vise, I'd go with a heavy hand screw mounted at an angle on the right side of a sliding deadman. (assuming your front vise is on the left of your bench) It would provide excellent work holding opportunities, could be used as a vise in a pinch, and wouldn't require holding the piece in the air with one hand while adjusting the vise with the other... necessarily. That, and it's basically a simpler modification of an existing tool, that doesn't require as much in the way of work or materials as a full blown sliding leg vise would.

Couldn't you get a similar result with a thick deadman and a couple of the Veritas hold-downs? With these, and enough holes you could clamp your work horizontally or vertically.

I was originally going to drill the holes in a zig-zag pattern that I've seen on others, similar to the pattern on the English workbench's skirt. But now I'm thinking more of a grid, which would allow for greater flexibility in either vertical or horizontal clamping.

I think the sliding leg vise would require less fuss in set-up, and be faster to use, but I think I could also get the same kinds of benefits from my deadman and a couple of hold-downs (or hold fasts) you can get the work done. As they say, there's usually more than one way.

But the sliding vise definitely looks cool!

Andrew