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My Timberframe Cabin Page.

THIS WEBSITE IS MOVING

Yahoo!Geocities is discontinuing webhosting for the Geocities Domain. As a result I will be having to move this page to my permanent URL: www.mvr1.com. Please change your bookmarks and links as I don't know when Yahoo! will be pulling the plug on this site. The NEW URL for this page will be http://www.mvr1.com/myworkbenches.html .

My First Bench

My first bench was a european style bench with a tail vise and a shoulder vise. The latter has yet to be installed (as you can see in the photos). The tail vise, on the other hand has been installed several times, or to put it a bit differently, I have had three different tail vises on the end of my bench. More on that later. The bench itself is made mostly of maple with some birch, poplar and walnut for a part here or there. It is the standard L-shape, with a tool tray along the rear of the bench. The top is laminated maple with maple endcaps fastened crosswise, bolted in only one location to allow for seasonal wood movement. The legs themselves are a trestle secured by bolts through the stretchers. A picture of the bench can be viewed at the top of this page.

So why have I used three different tail vises on one bench? Since I have two rows of benchdog holes running down the bench on either side of the top, I wanted a vise with two holes corresponding to each row of dogholes. To do this I made a wooden jaw to hold the dogs, and then attached it to a standard face vise to provide the movement and clamping action. The result was pretty terrible racking whenever I used only one dog, since the vise screw did not line up with the dog holes. I tried again with a more substantial quick release vise I found at a garage sale. This was more serviceable, but the racking was still there. Then I got an Emmert patternmaker's vise. This vise was not really appropriate to this bench. So I started building a new bench, which turned out to need a vise for the front in addition to the Emmert. I decided to use the quick release vise from my old bench and to spring for the Veritas twin screw vise to replace it as the tail vise on my first bench.

As I said, I bought the Veritas twin-screw for the tailvise. The only trouble was it needs six inch deep front and back jaws and my endcaps and old vise jaw were closer to four inches. The instructions suggest just adding a new back jaw over the old end of the bench, but it seemed to me that this would make the bench look ungainly. Instead I proceeded to mortise and relaminate the existing endcap to a new depth of 7 inches without increasing its thickness. The trick was to do this without damaging the dovetails that hold the endcaps to the bench. And, while I was at that, I decided to make an entirely new front jaw for the vise rather than modify the old one. You can see how that turned out in the photos above and below, especially the view from the front of the workbench.