Benchcrafted

We're happy to announce that the Benchcrafted Carver's Vise is finally ready.

This whole process started seven years ago (almost to the day) when Chris Schwarz blogged about Louis Bois' carver's chops from La Forge Royale. Read more about that post here.

Then one night during a WIA conference, Louis Bois pulled his original carver's chops from the trunk of his Nissan Juke, and pitched the idea of us making the metal parts for a run of vises. We bit.



After 19 months we finally have all the bits and piece ready to sell. It was no easy task to design the parts for the vise. We wanted to basically replicate Louis' example in every detail, and we've come darn close. Our version is about 97.6% faithful to the La Forge Royale original.



The components are made entirely from cold rolled steel, and every part is machined to precise dimensions. There are no stamped parts. 95% of the vise is manufactured from scratch by us. We've even gone to the trouble of incorporating some different machining techniques to give a hint of the hand-wrought look of the original.


The rear of the vise is the part that moves, and is completely removable once the screw is unthreaded all the way. The two sliding brackets feature an integral lip that traps the rear jaw, keying it onto the slide rails that run along the base of the vise. The rear jaw traverses the base smoothly, and does not rack or shift during use. The 7/8" dia. acme screw is the same size as the original.



The base of the vise attached to a bench via a mounting screw with a large square head. This head slides up through a mortise at the end of the base, and holds the base down on two 1/8" thick steel bearing plates that attach inside the mortise. The entire vise can swivel 360 degrees, and can cantilever off the edge of a bench while still remaining rock solid. This is very handy for doing spokeshave work on chair parts, or the like. A cover plate keeps shavings and dust from fouling the mounting screw.


Engaging the mounting screw is a tapped cast iron handwheel which cinches down the vise with great pressure and is easy to adjust by reaching under the benchtop. A thick steel washer takes wear and distributes the holding pressure on the underside of the bench. Changing position of the vise is quick and easy. You can even pick a favorite spot on your bench for the vise, mortise for the square head of the mounting screw, then let the head drop into the mortise when not using the vise. You can keep the mounting screw, washer and handwheel on the bench at all times. To mount the vise simply place the base over the square head, push the screw up and engage the rails in the vise's base. Quick and easy.


The head of the main screw is branded with the the Benchcrafted name and logo, and "USA". We're proud to say that this vise is manufactured (like all our vises) in the United States. For demonstration purposes we've filled the stamped brand with white enamel. Vises will be supplied with unfilled brands. We like the minimalist look (we're not big fans of overt branding) of the unfilled lines, but if you'd like to fill your's, by all means feel free. We simply painted on the white enamel, let it set for about a minute, then wiped it off with a paper towel wrapped tight around a cork block. We wet the towel slightly with lacquer thinner to remove any surface film. Below is an unfilled example.



All parts of the vise (except the nut, mounting screw, handwheel and bearing plates) are finished in hot black oxide and oiled. Your vise parts will arrive wrapped in paper and oily. You should remove most of the oil before you begin building your vise. Use a paper towel and a little mineral spirits. It's okay to leave the parts a little oily.

The Benchcrafted Carver's Vise is available in kit form only. That is, the metal parts pictured above. You will need to build the vise around the metal parts. It is an enormously satisfying build, much like building a great bench, without all the heavy lifting. It's also a great project for a special piece of wood you've been holding onto.


For those who don't have any of that special wood, we have a limited number of 16/4, mixed rift and quartersawn American beech billets that we are offering along with the vise components. This is excellent quality beech, and is completely traditional for tool making. Wood being wood, we can't guarantee the blanks, or accept returns on these. The vise pictured above was made with the same wood we're offering. The blanks will vary slightly in width. Each billet will provide more than enough wood to build one complete vise.

Prices:

Benchcrafted Carver's Vise (hardware components only): $379 plus shipping

Benchcrafted Carver's Vise (hardware components) & Beech Billet: $439 plus shipping

Vices will go on sale at 10am (CST), Friday May 24. You can place an order through our store page. 

If you're attending Handworks, we'll also have vises (and beech billets) at the event.

Measured drawings and construction notes will be available for free download in the next few weeks. 

Note:

Unlike our other products, this is a limited run. When they are gone, we may or may not make them again. We won't have a page on our website about this vise. This blog post is it. If you want one, again be sure to check the store page on the May 24th after 10am. Refresh your browser if you don't see the carver's vise on the page.




Carvings generously provided by Louis Bois and Andrew Lunn.

We're happy to announce that the Benchcrafted Carver's Vise is finally ready.

This whole process started seven years ago (almost to the day) when Chris Schwarz blogged about Louis Bois' carver's chops from La Forge Royale. Read more about that post here.

Then one night during a WIA conference, Louis Bois pulled his original carver's chops from the trunk of his Nissan Juke, and pitched the idea of us making the metal parts for a run of vises. We bit.



After 19 months we finally have all the bits and piece ready to sell. It was no easy task to design the parts for the vise. We wanted to basically replicate Louis' example in every detail, and we've come darn close. Our version is about 97.6% faithful to the La Forge Royale original.



The components are made entirely from cold rolled steel, and every part is machined to precise dimensions. There are no stamped parts. 95% of the vise is manufactured from scratch by us. We've even gone to the trouble of incorporating some different machining techniques to give a hint of the hand-wrought look of the original.


The rear of the vise is the part that moves, and is completely removable once the screw is unthreaded all the way. The two sliding brackets feature an integral lip that traps the rear jaw, keying it onto the slide rails that run along the base of the vise. The rear jaw traverses the base smoothly, and does not rack or shift during use. The 7/8" dia. acme screw is the same size as the original.



The base of the vise attached to a bench via a mounting screw with a large square head. This head slides up through a mortise at the end of the base, and holds the base down on two 1/8" thick steel bearing plates that attach inside the mortise. The entire vise can swivel 360 degrees, and can cantilever off the edge of a bench while still remaining rock solid. This is very handy for doing spokeshave work on chair parts, or the like. A cover plate keeps shavings and dust from fouling the mounting screw.


Engaging the mounting screw is a tapped cast iron handwheel which cinches down the vise with great pressure and is easy to adjust by reaching under the benchtop. A thick steel washer takes wear and distributes the holding pressure on the underside of the bench. Changing position of the vise is quick and easy. You can even pick a favorite spot on your bench for the vise, mortise for the square head of the mounting screw, then let the head drop into the mortise when not using the vise. You can keep the mounting screw, washer and handwheel on the bench at all times. To mount the vise simply place the base over the square head, push the screw up and engage the rails in the vise's base. Quick and easy.


The head of the main screw is branded with the the Benchcrafted name and logo, and "USA". We're proud to say that this vise is manufactured (like all our vises) in the United States. For demonstration purposes we've filled the stamped brand with white enamel. Vises will be supplied with unfilled brands. We like the minimalist look (we're not big fans of overt branding) of the unfilled lines, but if you'd like to fill your's, by all means feel free. We simply painted on the white enamel, let it set for about a minute, then wiped it off with a paper towel wrapped tight around a cork block. We wet the towel slightly with lacquer thinner to remove any surface film. Below is an unfilled example.



All parts of the vise (except the nut, mounting screw, handwheel and bearing plates) are finished in hot black oxide and oiled. Your vise parts will arrive wrapped in paper and oily. You should remove most of the oil before you begin building your vise. Use a paper towel and a little mineral spirits. It's okay to leave the parts a little oily.

The Benchcrafted Carver's Vise is available in kit form only. That is, the metal parts pictured above. You will need to build the vise around the metal parts. It is an enormously satisfying build, much like building a great bench, without all the heavy lifting. It's also a great project for a special piece of wood you've been holding onto.


For those who don't have any of that special wood, we have a limited number of 16/4, mixed rift and quartersawn American beech billets that we are offering along with the vise components. This is excellent quality beech, and is completely traditional for tool making. Wood being wood, we can't guarantee the blanks, or accept returns on these. The vise pictured above was made with the same wood we're offering. The blanks will vary slightly in width. Each billet will provide more than enough wood to build one complete vise.

Prices:

Benchcrafted Carver's Vise (hardware components only): $379 plus shipping

Benchcrafted Carver's Vise (hardware components) & Beech Billet: $439 plus shipping

Vices will go on sale at 10am (CST), Friday May 24. You can place an order through our store page. 

If you're attending Handworks, we'll also have vises (and beech billets) at the event.

Measured drawings and construction notes will be available for free download in the next few weeks. 

Note:

Unlike our other products, this is a limited run. When they are gone, we may or may not make them again. We won't have a page on our website about this vise. This blog post is it. If you want one, again be sure to check the store page on the May 24th after 10am. Refresh your browser if you don't see the carver's vise on the page.

With Handworks only a couple weeks away, we wanted to bring something special to the event.

So we dusted off our old French tool catalogs and set to work designing an etau.

What is an etau? The word simply means "vise" (plural "etaux") in French. It's pronounced kind of like "hey-tow" but don't pronounce the "h". Say it without the southern drawl. (thanks to Louis Bois for the French lesson)

Sharing its basic form and function with French carver's chops, this etau clamps to any surface via two wooden C-clamps scabbed onto the sides of the rear jaw. This serves a couple purposes, in our opinion.






First, it allows a screw (serving as a fulcrum/parallel mechanism) to pass through the rear jaw down low, and be clear of the two C-clamp screws.

Secondly, it allows two points of contact with the bench, reducing the tendency for rotation that would normally happen with single-point clamping.

As you can see in the etau drawing above (from the La Forge Royale catalog) the jaw is kept parallel via a St. Peter's Cross instead of a screw.

Since the St. Peter's Cross eliminates the need for space behind the rear jaw, we thought we'd also trim off the C-Clamps. They serve no functional purposes beyond holding the vise to the bench.

A trimmer, more compact vise would also mean greater portability.



In our version we used a single mounting screw from below, coupled with two "arms" from above, which provides three-point clamping, reducing the tendency for rotation. Suede on the bottom of the arms and at the back of the rear jaw eliminates any movement. The vise is as rock solid as the surface its clamped to. The upper and lower arms are dadoed into the rear jaw.

Right now we're just enjoying the classic appeal of this vise. We'd like to make a run of them at some point, but we have several other new products we're working on at the moment that are ahead in the queue.

We'll have this vise in our space at Handworks.

To read more about the etau at the Chris Schwarz Blog, click here. 

We hate to make another announcement about the Carver's Vise without flat-out saying they are available, but here goes anyway.

Last week, during a glorious spring day, we roughed out billets of 16/4 American Beech for the Carver's Vise. This wood is a mix of quartersawn and rift sawn. We have a small quantity of these available, probably less than 50 total, which we'll be offering with the metal bits when the vise goes on sale.

For those who don't end up with the beech, here is a quick drawing of a 16/4 billet and all the parts for one vise, so you can try and hunt some stock down for your vise. The thicker half needs to finish out at 2-1/2" thick. You don't need 16/4 stock to build a vise, you can make the parts from 12/4 stock, or even thinner if you don't mind gluing up. We hope you build your's with at least 12/4 stock though.

Fair warning. We will have carver's vise pricing and ordering info up in the next couple weeks. We only made a few of these, and expect them to go fast. We'll make an announcement here on the blog when the new page and ordering info is up.

As the French Oak Roubo Project trudges forward, excitement builds as the various bits and pieces for the Plate 11 bench begin to emerge.

We've enlisted the expertise of the wood vise screw experts at Lake Erie Toolworks to create the massive French oak leg vise screws, plans for which we pulled directly from plate 11.



There is one issue with plate 11 which caused some head scratching. The threads on the leg vise screw are not rendered with the normal precision of Roubo's work. They are more of an illustration than a "schematic." The thread geometry varies by several degrees along the screw. The pitch of the threads is about 1-1/2 turns-per-inch, which although fast to operate, might be a little too fast for varying holding pressure. Using a 2 tpi wood screw, which provides a good balance of speed and control as a starting point, Nick at Lake Erie suggested we split the difference and try a 1-3/4 tpi pitch.


The result was a screw which would not only function sweetly, but also more closely match the robust threads from plate 11.


Lake Erie will also be cutting the threads for the Roubo screw directly into the bench legs, instead of using a separate nut. This will allow for more vise capacity with the same length screw.



These samples are made from Lake Erie's standard hard maple.

Once Lake Erie has created the screw, we will then fit the hand forged iron parts from blacksmith Peter Ross.

Amazingly, Peter does not use any jigs or forms to make the iron ferrule. Yet it's still a dead-on circle. And by dead-on, I'm talking thousandths of an inch. Remarkable.

Here are some pictures of the ferrule in process, as well as the finished handle and planing stop.

Peter's description of the process:

Poker-face warning: this is not an April Fool's gag (weren't quite clever enough this year!)

A couple of years ago I built a very large dining table for my home. It will seat ten comfortably, and several more if needed.

But I've held off on building chairs due to my inexperience with this furniture genre. The past couple years I've done a lot of research on chair types, or more accurately, chair-construction methods. I've spent a lot of my shop time making tree trunks into precise rectangles. So I thought it would be a good idea to branch out into a style of building that I was unfamiliar with. That led me towards the work of John Brown and his Welsh stick chairs.


His book stayed in my mind long after I closed the last page, and the pair of Welsh stick chairs by Chris Schwarz that I keep in my office serve as a constant reminder of this more rudimentary, non-rectangular construction style.


 Next I considered the work of Jeff Miller. Jeff is not only a friend, but he's also been a big influence and sounding board for new ideas in woodworking techniques. His chairs are undeniably comfortable and beautiful, but I felt like I needed to go even further back to an earlier evolutionary stage to find what I was looking for. Jeff makes his chairs with a combination of ancient and modern techniques, but I wanted something more ancient.

Then, in the middle of this process Konrad Sauer started building a set of chairs for his dining table and that got my mind reeling with yet another option. Konrad's interpretation of Maloof's joint was intriguing, but again I found myself drawn to the rudiments of the craft.


But as I usually do, I find myself returning full circle.

I've followed the work of Peter Galbert for a number of years, and aesthetically his more modern chairs have appealed to me the most. However, I'm not a huge fan of the classic windsor chair (in all its varieties), but I have become quite a fan of the windsor technology. Call it green woodworking, stick chairs, whatever. I simply think it makes a lot of sense to build a chair this way, and for the way I want to work, it's enormously appealing. Of course Peter's work has greatly influenced my decision to try this method.














To test my theory I decided to build one of Peter's Smarthead shaving horses. The project itself uses chairmaking technology, so I thought it would be a good exercise to answer some of my curiosities.  Last year I drew up plans in Sketchup for the Smarthead portion, but before I got a chance to build one Pete made a bunch of refinements to the design and asked if I would mind making the changes to the plans. I was happy to oblige. So after many long nights after work and numerous emails back and forth with Pete,  I decided to completely redraw the Smarthead. I then generated 2-d plans of all the components. I also drew a Sketchup drawing of Pete's shavehorse to supplement the Smarthead plans.

To download the 2-d prints of the Smarthead, click here.
To download the Sketchup drawing of the Smarthead Shavehorse, click here.

The Sketchup drawing does not show the tapered dowels nor their matching angled holes in detail. They are simply represented in the drawing. To understand how the dumbhead is secured to the Smarthead, and also how the housing is secured to the plank, see Pete's video.

With plans in hand, I headed out to the shop to build my first shavehorse.


With help from Pete and Steve's sightline ruler I laid out my sightlines for the splayed legs of the plank. I didn't have enough width on the plank to lay out for the rake, so I butted another board to the edge to get the intersection.


 Once I had the first sightline established, I set a bevel gauge to the angle and laid out the other three. 

 The first pair of legs were a tad off.


But the second pair were better.



 By the time I had the holes reamed, and the legs fit, I had my answer. This was the way I'd build my chairs.




This is how I drilled the legs for the stretchers. Don't laugh, my lasers will be here tomorrow....








The plank is spalted maple. It's solid around the legs.

The legs are not glued or wedged into the plank, but simply tapped firmly into the tapered holes. This allows the horse to knock down for storage and transport.

With the plank and legs done, I focused on the housing and the Smarthead. The latter is made exclusively of beech.








I used some square nuts to keep the shafts in place. More on this below. 




 

In use, the upper pivot shaft must end flush with the sides of the Smarthead, otherwise workpieces can get trapped under the exposed portion, in this case the square nut, instead of being held down by the front of the dumbhead. So I removed the nuts, and cut the shaft shorter.

This was one of the funnest projects I've done in a long time. But now the real fun begins. Sourcing wood for my set of dining chairs.

The Noden allows quick, easy, and rigid height adjustment for dialing in the perfect position for sawing dovetails.

That would be an easy thing to accomplish with a fixed-height bench. But what makes the Noden quite useful in this case is its ability to double as a bench for kids.


I have an old benchtop in my personal shop with a Noden base, and it is just perfect for growing kids.

Another advantage of the Noden base in this application is for dovetailing long boards. If you're building the Jefferson bookcases the 48" case width will mean the end of your board is too tall even for an auxiliary Moxon on your main bench--the board will be up past the jaws too far. You'll need to raise the Moxon up even more, and with a Noden this is easy. It's not every day you're dovetailing such long boards, but it does happen. You may need to rig up some scaffolding to get your body up higher too. I lay a couple 8/4 boards on the ground in front of the bench.

To read more about Narayan's joinery bench, click here.


We try to keep Moxon vises in stock at all times. Right now, they are in stock.