Leg vise design and experimentation

Until a few years ago I had never heard of nor seen a leg vise.  The buzz around leg vises, in particular the Benchcrafted Glide Leg Vise, has been growing over the past few years.  This is likely in response to Oprah, errr Schwarz and his penchant for workbenches and accessories.  I chose to go with the vise screw from Lee Valley and build the rest of the leg vise parts myself.  This do-it-yourself thing is good on some levels (financial for one) but not so great when you get an idea into your head that won’t go away.

Chris Schwarz has been regaling the community with the benefits of a Croix de St Pierre, or St Peter’s Cross and its incorporation into a leg vise.  I was intrigued by the mechanics of this and wanted to pursue making one myself just to see what was involved.  I experimented.  I used steel L bar, which wasn’t at a true right angle and still has the ability flex quite a bit.  Into the scrap bin that went.  I tried steel box tubing.  I actually got quite a bit of success playing with this on some scraps, using the already purchased vise screw.  So why does it not appear below in the pictures?  I found other points of failure.  I used hinges to hold the bars to the chop and leg, only to find that they were neither strong enough to not buckle under the pressure nor was pine a good substrate for the screws that held them in place.  The other setback was how the pine (which is what my base is made of) allowed the bars to compress the leg enough to put the whole mechanism out of square.

Workbench base

The lady asked, “Where’s the beef?”  I’ve got your beefy goodness right here under my workbench.  The base is built from 6″x6″ pine and it’s every bit as beefy as it looks in the pictures.  I knew I wanted to make the base as hefty as possible (going with the Workbench commandments).  The best I could find that was both reasonably priced and reasonably dry was some pine timbers from the lumber mill that had been there for “a few years” according to the lumberyard assistant.

Bench slabs done!

There really isn’t a whole lot to say about this part, so this is going to be pretty short.  In the last post I added the tail vise to the front slab, which more or less finishes it off.  The rear slab is a solid chunk of maple, which I had already planed flat.  All that really remained for this was to clean up the sides of the slab.  I actually thought this was going to be harder than it turned out to be.  I did the majority of the work with my jack plane, getting the edges square to the surface of the slab.  The rest was just final cleanup with my #6 jointer.  In all, both sides took me somewhere on the order of 1/2 hour to clean up.

Installing the tail vise

The front slab is all laminated up and the end caps in place, the next step is to install the tail vise (which I describe building in this blog post).  Installing the guide plate onto the slab requires a couple of extra steps.  First, there is a bolt head protruding out the back of the plate to hold the nut for the vise screw, so we need to make a recess for this.  Second, the rails protrude a little as they wrap themselves around the guide plate, so a channel needs to be cut out to allow them to move freely.  Oh…and my bench isn’t thick enough, so I had to glue on another 3/4″ piece to allow me to screw the guide plate onto something.