Moxon Vise

This classic Moxon vise allows you to hold a wide board at a comfortable height.

Project #2506 • Skill Level: Beginner • Time: 2 Days • Cost: $60 + Hardware

On most workbenches, you have various options to hold your material. Where most benches fail is holding stock, particularly wide stock, for work on the end of the board, such as when you’re cutting dovetails. This Moxon vise (named for the English author Joseph Moxon, who first illustrated it in a book) is designed to do just that. The pair of hand wheels move the front chop to pinch boards in place during work. It’s a great aid to have in any shop.

Necessary Hardware: Find the hardware needed for the bench on the Benchcrafted website.
Online Extras: See all of the online extras from the June 2025 issue, including details on the Moxon Vise.
Additional Reading: Christopher Schwarz ponders if the Moxon Vise was actually invented by Italians…. in the 1300’s.

When you look at the vise above, you’ll notice that there are few parts. Starting at the rear of the vise, you’ll find two parts here—a narrow batten and a rear jaw.  Ultimately, the batten and rear jaw will be edge glued together. If you are concerned about grain continuity and color match, mill a ~9“ wide, 48“ long board to 1-3/4“ and rip off material for the batten and rear jaw. Crosscut the rear jaw to the final length by removing an equal amount of materials from both ends. This will ensure an invisible glue line when you join the batten and rear jaw.

Now, moving to the front, the front jaw is made up of one big slab of wood with a pair of holes for the screws. Mark up this location of screw holes in the front jaw. On both sides of the jaw, make a mark 4-7/8 “ from each edge and centered along the width. On the front face of the jaw, strike a line 7/16“ to the left and right of each mark. These will form the extremes of the elongated holes for the front jaw, allowing it to be skewed slightly, preventing binding during use.

Now, the front jaw (and rear jaw, for that matter) don’t need to be fancy. However, adding a few details to each makes them more attractive. Looking at the diagram in the next section, mark the location of the fillet/end ogees, lamb tongues, and stopped chamfer on the front jaw. Make sure you spend a good amount of time making clear marks on all necessary faces of the jaw—the chamfer and lamb tongue should be clearly marked on the front face and top edge, and the end ogee should be marked on both the top and bottom edge. While you are at it, mark the location of the ogees and fillet on the ends of the rear batten, again making sure to mark up both sides. Clear markings will greatly assist in finally shaping and give you proper guidelines to work from, so don’t skip this step!

Before any shaping can be done, start by chucking a 1“ Forstner bit into a drill press. Now, drill a hole 1“ deep in the marks you made on the inside of the front jaw. These countersunk holes will provide clearance for a pair of screw springs when the vise is fully closed. These help to force the jaws open so you’re not constantly pulling on the front jaw to put a board in place.

Replace the 1“ Forstner bit with a 3/4“ bit. Flip the front jaw over and concentrate on the holes from the front. When drilling the elongated holes in the front jaw, you want to make sure they are about 7/8“ wide (which is why you made the marks 7/16“ off-center in step two) but exactly 3/4“ tall.

To do this, make sure your Forstner bit is exactly aligned with the center mark for the hole along with the width of the jaw, but with the cutter just touching one of the extreme lines you drew in step two. After you have aligned everything, firmly clamp the front jaw to the drill press table and drill 3/4“ deep (or until it meets the hole you drilled from the back). Shift the jaw over laterally while keeping the bit centered along the width, clamp it down, and drill the remaining “web” of the elongated hole. As long as everything is clamped down tightly and your Forstner bit is sharp, you shouldn’t have any issues.

At the end of the process, you should have two elongated holes on the face of the front jaw and two countersunk 1“ holes on the back. Since the elongated hole is just smaller than the countersunk hole, it provides just enough of a ledge to keep the screw springs in place.

Cutlist and Diagrams

Detail Work

Now, we can shift focus to cutting some of the extravagant details on the vise. Use a backsaw to define a kerf cut at the end of each lamb’s tongue, between the chamfer and the lamb’s tongue. Make sure you don’t go beyond the marks on the top and front of the jaw.

Mark the extremes of the stopped chamfer on one each of the jaws for setup purposes. Over at the table saw, position the jaw on a crosscut sled or miter gauge and raise the blade/adjust the sled until the blade is just shy of both extremes (photo 6). Depending on the size of the blade in your saw, it may not be possible to line this up perfectly—that’s fine; just try to set things up so you will be removing as much material as possible. 

After you’ve determined the sled’s optimal location and blade height, clamp a stop inside your miter slot to ensure you don’t push your sled too far.

Start removing material for the stopped chamfer by slightly engaging the table saw blade into the front jaw’s waste section and sliding from left to right. The kerf cuts you made earlier will provide you with nice visual stopping points at both extremes.

As you do this, make sure you apply firm pressure against the miter gauge/sled fence and not putting too much stress on the saw blade. Take light passes, much like at a router table, pushing the jaw slightly forward between each pass. Once you make your pass with the gauge hitting the stop you set in the previous step, you’re done.

While you are at the table saw, it’s a good idea to establish the fillet cuts on both the front jaw and rear batten. Simply raise the table saw blade to meet your mark and make a crosscut (photo 8). It’s a good idea to remove a bit more material beyond the fillet and into the waste sections where the curves are—this will provide clearance for your bandsaw blade when making subsequent cuts.

At the bandsaw, cut the curves at the ends of the front jaw and batten using a 1/4“ wide blade. Make sure your blade is square to the table and try to stay just outside of your line in the waste section—this will save you a ton of time cleaning things up later.

Moving to Hand Tools

With that, all the power tool work of shaping the front jaw and batten are done. The rest of the work is simply using hand tools to take any remaining waste down to your final marks. Start by bringing the stopped chamfer down to the final dimension. The table saw cuts you made previously will leave a chamfer that appears as “hollow ground.” Start removing material using a flat bottom spokeshave. The high points of the “hollow ground” chamfer will do a good job of keeping you stabilized. Remove as much material as possible, repeatedly checking your lines on the top and face of the jaw to ensure you don’t go past them. 

The spokeshave won’t be able to reduce the chamfer to final dimensions near the extremes, so use a chisel to lightly pare this section down, keeping firm pressure against the established section of the chamfer as you go. Finish the chamfer off with a series of cards, scrapers, rasps, and sandpaper.

With the chamfer fully established, move on to cutting the lamb’s tongues. Before carving, I like to tape a scrap piece of veneer to the chamfer, just in case my chisel slips. 

I do all my carving with a 1“ bench chisel, which is easy enough as long as you orient the bevel properly during cuts. I start by knocking the corner next to the chamfer down. Since this section is where the outside curve of the lamb’s tongue is, I keep the bevel of my chisel up. This lets me properly curve the chisel as I carve to follow my pencil lines. 

After removing some material here, I’ll move to the other section of the lamb’s tongue. This section should be thought of as two separate curves that meet at a trough. The key to successful carving here is to keep the bevel of the chisel down (since both are inside curves) and to have your chops start at the peak of the curve and terminate at the trough. This means carving this section by attacking the curves from both sides. If you try to do all the carving from one side, you’ll inevitably have to make a chisel cut that starts at the trough of a curve and goes to its peak, a move that will undoubtedly result in grain blowout.

As I work, I constantly move to different sections of the lamb’s tongue, removing a bit of material from one spot before moving on to another. As I get closer to my lines, my chisel chops will become controlled paring cuts, with my dominant hand steering the chisel by the handle. 

Once I’ve removed as much material as I’m comfortable with using a chisel, I’ll switch to a fine-cut rasp. Try to make sure you aren’t rounding the profile of the lamb’s tongue as you work to your lines—repeatedly checking across it with a straight edge helps to keep it nice and flat. 

Shaping the ogees of the batten and front jaw is much more straightforward. Clean up the fillets on both the batten and the front jaw using a shoulder plane. Remove any bandsaw marks on the ogees using a series of hand planes, rasps, or whatever you have. Just make sure you check your lines on both sides as you work, and repeatedly check across the profiles with a straight edge to ensure they are staying flat as you go.

Moving to the Batten

Edge glue the batten to the rear jaw. After the glue has dried, clamp the front jaw on the rear jaw/batten assembly. If you follow the cut list, you’ll notice that the front jaw is about 1/8“ wider than the rear jaw. This is intentional—line up the front jaw so the top is flush with the top of the rear jaw. This will allow you to easily register the vise against the front edge of your bench.

Next, with the front jaw clamped in place, use a 3/4“ Forstner bit to mark the location of the screw hole in the rear jaw, making sure the bit is roughly centered along the elongated hole on the front jaw.

Remove the front jaw and drill a 3/4“ hole through the rear jaw at the locations you marked in the previous step. Thread one of the nuts on the end of each screw and pass it through the back of the rear jaw. Thread the second nut on each screw until the screws are firmly secured to the raw jaw. Align the nut on the inside of the rear jaw to your liking, and with a marking knife pressed firmly against the edge of the nut, mark the location of the nut. Now, the task is to chop that nut shape out.

Using a 1/4“ upcut spiral bit, rout just shy of your marks to a bit deeper than the nut’s height. Finish the walls of the nut recess off with a chisel and check to make sure it sits below the surface of the rear jaw when in place.

Thread and fasten both screws through the rear jaw, making sure the nuts on the interior of the jaw are fully recessed. Slide the screw springs over the screws, then fit the front jaw over the screws and fasten the wheels. With the front jaw closed, plane the top of the rear and/or front jaw until they are flush.

Finally, line the jaws with some form of grippy material. The Benchcrafted hardware comes with rubber for the jaws. I use contact cement to apply it. Alternatives you could use would be sheets of cork or leather. If you use leather, you can apply it with contact cement or hide glue.

As an added decoration, I inlaid a few marquetry panels into the rear batten. If you’ve never tried a marquetry panel, this is a great place to try it. Shop projects like this are great practice pieces for new techniques. Now, you can leave the vise unfinished if you’d like, but a little oil adds some protection and nice color.

Extra Credit: Marquetry Panel Inlays

While the glue dried, I decided to inlay some marquetry panels of dogwood flowers into each side of the batten. The process here is straightforward—I put the panel in place, score its location with a knife, rout out the bulk of the material with a router, then finish off the recess with a chisel.

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