I’ve spent a good chunk of today working on my workbench. First I had to clear everything off it; both the top, with the clutter that accumulates on that, and the base shelf, where I now store wood and several tool boxes.
Once cleared, I up-ended the bench and had a couple of goes at finding a new position for the vice. Formerly the vice was dreadfully out of square. On my second attempt of today, after a failed first try, I decided to radically rework the cutaway I’d made on my original attempt at mounting the vice, yonks ago.
Rather annoyingly I didn’t document the various stages. A pity, as quite a lot of effort and work was entailed. I used the layered or laminated nature of the workbench top to work back to a complete new plank, hoping as a result of achieve a squarer mounting. And it seems to have worked.
Next I need to ‘build back’ to use a modern political. 1 catchphrase, simultaneously filling in the excess I cut away, and providing the clamp with a wooden back face. I’ll also attach a wooden front face as well. But that might have to wait till tomorrow.
The floorboard timber I used to make the rear face of the clamp is the same stock of timber the whole bench is built from, out of an old Victorian town house. I cut it to size, routed out a recess to accept the rear face of the vice. Drilled two holes to screw it in place. And finally planed it flush to the bench surface.
As anyone who knows me well will realise, I’m a man of many vices. As well as the nice old blue Record vice, I have the red Fuller one pictured above. That’ll most likely get bolted to a block of wood, for use clamped into the Record vice. Compounding my vices!
And a bit later… after watching Pacific Rim, I couldn’t stay away. And went back and added a wooden (ply wood, in fact) front jaw. see pics below!
Tragically all my plane handles I made recently l – I used both my Handyman planes, flattening stuff on the bench/vice – have broken. The dark wood one was too dry and brittle, and snapped off and was re-glued repeatedly. The soft pine wood one was always going to be too weak. I need to start over with these bits, and do them in a much denser stronger wood.