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Last summer I built a workbench that was as close to the bench shown in A.-J. Roubo’s plate 11 as I could manage. While I still have three details to add to my bench (a drawer, a tool rack and a grease pot), the rest of the bench has been up and running since August 2013.
The leg vise is perhaps the most unusual feature of this circa 1768 workbench. As shown in Plate 11, the vise has neither a parallel guide, nor a garter. Also unusual: the vise’s jaw is quite close to the floor.
When I built this vise, I had misgivings about missing these features – the parallel guide and garter – I am so fond of. But I figured I could always modify the vise if it got too annoying.
Surprisingly, I have been pleased with the vise.
The lack of a garter (which locks the screw to the jaw) isn’t the end of the world. Yes, I have to pull the jaw back at times, which is an extra step. But I do this with my Moxon vise, and I really don’t miss the garter.
The missing parallel guide is even more of an interesting tale.
One night after a few beers, I was scouring Roubo’s text for some details on how the leg vise should work and I misread one section. (Kids: You should not drink and translate.)
Here is what Roubo actually wrote:
When you use it, you must take care to put at the base a caul of a thickness equal to that of the work, so that the head of the screw creates equal pressure everywhere….
I stupidly (perhaps drunkenly) misread that thinking that Roubo intended the caul to be tapered along its length. So the next morning I went down and used a long tapered offcut that was lying around from cutting a tapered leg.
I slid the caul left and right with my foot – no stooping, like with a parallel guide. I was impressed. So I went back upstairs and looked for the passage again and realized I had misread it. Oh well.
In any case, the tapered caul allows me to clamp a wide range of thicknesses from 0” to more than 2” with the one tapered caul. That covers 99 percent of my needs.
Later on I found out that the vise has a built-in parallel guide for larger work. I’ll deal with that feature in a future blog post. It’s happy hour here and I have some more translating to do.
— Christopher Schwarz
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