Basque Workbenches – With Unusual Face Vises

Take one leg vise. Rotate it 90°. Now you have a Basque face vise.

Woodworker Matt Talley is working in France right now. And during his free time he is hunting down workbenches in the Southern France/Basque region. He’s posted photos of some of his interesting finds at his web site here.

I’ve been poring over his photos and found lots of interesting details (the bolted-on dog strip, for one) that I’ll write about at a later date. But for this post, I want to focus on the face vise.

Talley asked one of the local “old guys” about the unusual vises and he responded it was a common feature of benches in the region. But how do they work?

Tally says he’s seen three mechanisms for applying pressure to the right of the screw, which is the working area of the vise.

1. A parallel bar guide with a collar. Imagine something like this setup from Richard Maguire’s pinless face vise.

2. A square wooden block, similar to what you see in many English face vises, such as the Nicholson workbench. The block runs in a channel and wedges in the channel when a workpiece is placed in the vise’s jaws.

3. No guide. The jaw applies pressure to the work when a wedge is placed between the jaw and benchtop on the left of the screw.

Also interesting is the decorative detail cut into the right-most end of the vises’ jaws. I suspect this feature makes it less likely you will run into the jaw when you are planing on the benchtop.

Thanks to Tally for sharing his finds (and yes, he plans on bringing some workbenches home with him when he leaves France).

— Christopher Schwarz

Like old-style workbenches. Check out my DVD that covers how to make an 18th-century workbench using hand tools only. It’s available from ShopWoodworking.com.