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I’ll assume you read Bench Mod 1 – Tool Tray Clean-out and I’ll skip the historical banter. If you read it you know that I have a few concerns with the Norm Abram workbench design. This modification is aimed at the biggest problem with the design, a lack of clamping capability.
While the tail vise of the original design performs many of the needed clamping functions admirably, you can’t use it to clamp parts for sawing dovetails and edge planing. Being a fanatic about hand cutting my dovetails, this has always presented me with a major pain in the joint. Until recently I have been circumventing the inevitable by laying pipe clamps across the top of the bench from front to back. Not only is this very awkward, but if you change to a thicker board, you have to reach across the bench to readjust the clamp ends. This has produced a flurry of sailor talk in my shop.
The obvious solution is to buy a proper face vise. However, I intend to retire this bench in the future and build one of solid hardwood with handmade bench vises. I would rather spend the money on a wood threading kit big enough to build that bench. There had to be a better solution so off I went in search of a deal.
I happened to find a cheap Record style face vise on Ebay so I bought it. With shipping it cost under twenty dollars. When the vise arrived, it was smaller than I expected and somewhat sloppy. I decided I could work around most of the deficiencies.
I mounted the vise to the bottom of the bench using four large screws. Fortunately, when it was designed, they did take into account the presence of bench dogs. I was able to straddle a bench dog mortise so that the mechanism would not interfere with the tail vise. The little vise had an impressive clamping capacity for its size but the jaws were very small.
I had intended to increase the face area of the vise jaws by covering the enameled metal jaws with wood, regardless of the fact the vise came to me smaller than expected. I simply had to work on a smaller scale. A scrap of pine I had laying around was selected to perform this function.
Pine was used because it’s soft and I wanted to make sure that the jaws didn’t mark up any expensive hardwoods used in projects. With softwood jaw liners I shouldn’t have to worry about tightening the vise too much.
I cut the scrap into three pieces, eleven inches by four and a half inches, three quarters of an inch thick. Two of the pieces were laminated to provide an extra thick block to cover the cast iron, moveable jaw. Meanwhile the third piece was mortised to fit over the fixed jaw.
I held the liner in place and took my measurements simply by transferring the length, width and depth of the mortise directly off the jaw, trying to keep the top of the completed vise assembly just below the bench top. Most of the cutting was done with a spiral bit in the router but the clean up and final adjustments were made with a bench chisel. The liner was then mounted over the fixed jaw and anchored to the side of the bench with four countersunk screws.
Much the same process was used with the movable jaw liner. Once it was mortised, I chamfered the ends with a No.5 Bailey pattern plane and placed two screws through the metal jaw from the front into the block. Then I had to deal with the slop in the mechanism. The sagging jaw created a gap between the two liners at the top when the vise was closed.
To work around the gap, I measured the width of the opening at the top, then removed the jaw liner and marked the size of the gap at the bottom of the jaw on the ends. I connected that mark with the top corner on each end. This was my layout to allow for the tapering of the face of the block. Using a No.5 Stanley jack plane I removed most of the taper, finishing it off on the jointer. The reduction in thickness at the bottom of the liner near the mechanism allowed the jaws to close completely at the top. All that was left was to run the jack plane over the top to make both the fixed and moveable jaw liners flush.
What I came up with is not the Cadillac edition face vise but it does work and should perform well for me long enough to get my dream bench built. It certainly does make my present bench easier to work with.
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