Ever since the minute I built my first leg vise, it has been my vise of choice. It is simple, offers lots of room for clamping and it doesn’t have horizontal guide bars that get in the way. Its downside? Most people would say it’s the parallel guide that is below the vise screw – … Read more
It’s fairly uncommon to find old workbenches in the wild that don’t have stretchers below the benchtop. After all, it’s quite handy to have a shelf down there for planes, other tools and furniture parts. So even if a workbench started life as a Roman-style bench without stretchers, I think there’s a fair chance that … Read more
I try to stay abreast of the world of workbenches and workholding. But sometimes a place like Evans Wood Screw Co. escapes my eye. For six years, this Franklin, Ind., enterprise has been cranking out wooden vise screws for workbench builders. You can find the company at TheTraditionalCarpenter.com. The small site offers a good selection … Read more
Finding a French-style workbench with a twin-screw vise is somewhat uncommon. And so what furniture maker Nick Webb stumbled upon on the Mediterranean island of Gozo is even more unusual. The bench is in the carpenter’s shop of the Ta’ Kola Windmill, an 18th-century structure on the island. The bones of the bench are fairly … Read more
We have iron planes and wooden planes. Iron vises and wooden ones. Iron clamps and wooden ones. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that you can have a wooden holdfast. But it does. Carpenter and researcher Jeff Burks passed me this clipping from a 1930 edition of Popular Mechanics, which discusses the “barilette,” which … Read more
I see a lot of workbenches. Lots of them are gorgeous. Many of them are tough. Few benches are both. Last weekend at Woodworking in America in Pasadena, Calif., I got to use a massive Nicholson-style workbench made by Erik Mortensen, an instructor at Cerritos College. For the most part, the bench is made from … Read more
Lake Erie Toolworks showed off a new wooden vise screw kit at Woodworking in America that can be used to make a nice wagon vise or shoulder vise. Both vises work brilliantly and allow you to easily use a wooden screw to make these traditional vise forms. The vises use the same robust vise screw … Read more
