Wagon Vise

A commenter asked about the wagon vise. Since I think it's a great addition to my bench, I thought I'd share a few thoughts about it.

The general concept is an old one, and I first encountered it from first Chris Schwarz's blog over at Woodworking Magazine (see blog roll on left), and then again in his workbench book. (which you should buy, right now. Go ahead, I'll wait......Back again? good)

The details of execution I came up with myself. I didn't want to do a bench bottom installation, and I thought, since I was designing this from scratch, and could incorporate it any way I wanted, I'd design it to be built-in to the bench itself. This allowed me to keep the design very simple, which is a benefit for an amateur like me.

The essential design is a block of wood (the chop) attached to the end of a small bench screw. The screw is fixed at the end of the bench, and the chop slides along a pair of grooves cut into the faces of the adjoining boards.

My top is made up of a series of 7/8 thick boards glued together. Board 1 is at the front of the bench where I stand, and board 14 is at the back. Board 1 is full length. Board 2 and 3 are short, thus creating the gap for the wagon vise. Board 4 is full length. There is a groove cut into the inside faces of boards 1 and 4 down which the chop moves. At the end of boards 2 and 3 is a block through which the screw passes and into which I inset the nut of the screw. This block is just glued face-t0-face with boards 1 and 4.

Here's a bad copy of the Visio drawing I made of it.

Update: I realized the I forgot to point out that my original drawing had the vise only one board wide, but when I got past measurements, and got to the real objects, I realized that I needed to make it two-boards wide. You must always be ready to change design in the face of reality. At least those of us as bad at design as I am.

Here's a photo of it installed. You can see the groove and the tabs on the chop that slide in the groove. You'll notice that I made the chop so the grain went the opposite direction of the bench top. I did this because I had to laminate the chop together to encase the pad of the bench screw.

Perhaps this is a good time to revisit how I built it. (you can read my account at the time in an earlier post)

First the chop. I had to make this several times as I kept learning and screwing up the layout dimensions. I also started to go down the path of a half-dovetail design for the tabs and groove, but realized what a total pain that was going to be to cut in the hard maple. So I went with square, which works just fine.

First I cut out the three pieces and then ganged them together to cut the tabs.

Now, this is what the screw looks like.

It's a press screw for book presses or cider presses. The pad on the end has no built-in means of affixing it to a chop. I decided I didn't want to drill holes in it since I wasn't sure how all of this would work, and if I'd need to change the screw, and if the holes would weaken the already small pad. So I designed a means to encase the pad in the chop in such a way that i could take it out if necessary.

Here's the back-most layer of the chop. The keyhole shape is to allow the collar of the pad to stick through, and the slot in the bottom allows access to the bolt that holds the pad to the screw.

The middle layer of the chop I cut out a recess to accommodate the pad.

It was at about this point that I decided not to make the pad removable. I still needed access to the bolt to affix the pad to the screw, but I left the recess for the pad in the second layer just big enough for the pad. I then glued it all up.

Here it is all glued up and ready for mounting.

Here it is with the screw installed. The piece of scrap you see shows my initial thoughts on a half-dovetail design for the tabs.

The dog hole in the chop goes towards the end.

After that, it was time for the grooves.

After careful layout, and a lot of trying out prototypes (both of the design, and the technique to make such big stopped grooves), I cut the grooves. The grooves are about 1" wide and about 1/2" deep. All I had was a 1/2" pigsticker mortise chisel, a great big mallet and ear protection.

Here you can see how the chop slides in the grooves.

Making the block at the end that holds the nut for the screw was also a bit of a challenge, mainly because drilling out a large enough hole through end grain of hard maple is not a fun thing. I tried a bunch of different ways with what tools I had and ended up doing the e pluribus unum technique, "out of many holes, one" approach.

You'll notice the final hole is not exactly round, but not as distorted as it appears in the last picture. But it was good enough.

I tested it for length. (I learned, the hard way, to leave the boards all a little too long on one end and cut them off at the end rather than try and cut them all to perfect dimensions. There are no perfect dimensions)

And in the end, after gluing up, screwing up the glue-up and having to reglue (read back a bit in the blog for all the fun), I ended up with a great little wagon vise. It seems small, but it really holds quite well. I could pick up my bench, if I was strong enough, by a handle squeezed in my wagon vise. And I ended up using mainly wooden bench dogs made out of lengths of dowel with a little ball catch inset into the side to make sure the ill-fitting, cheap dowels don't end up on the floor too easily. I was afraid these wooden dogs wouldn't work, wouldn't hold, but even the soft, poplar-like ones from China just end up distorting a little bit to make a flat side, and hold like the dickens.

Even when I stick the dogs up high, it holds like a champ.

And for narrow stock, less than 3 1/4", I can clamp it directly and then nothing is moving when I do that.

I find that sometimes putting a wide piece of scrap in between the dog and the piece I'm working on helps to distribute the load and makes it clamp more securely.

Overall, I really like my wagon vise. It took a lot of fiddling to get it right, mainly because of my lack of skill or design sense, but once I figured out what I wanted to do, and how to do it, it was fairly straight forward. If I had a larger bench, I'd love to use one of the shorter shoulder vise screws used in European workbenches. It would be totally overkill, and would take up a fair amount of your bench, hence you'd need a big top for it to work, but it would be really cool.

And one more comment. When Chris Schwarz talked about his original wagon vise, he mentioned that he was concerned about all that force on just a small block at the end, so he put an end cap on his bench top. I decided to risk it, and I know it's still quite new, but so far it seems like it's doing just fine. It is about 12 square inches of face-to-face glue surface on each side, so that should be pretty strong. And it seems to be working.

Give it a shot on your own bench. Once you get the concept, it's not that difficult.

AAAndrew

First Blood and Mistake # 2,456,722 and counting

It's been quite a summer with not much shop time, but I'm hoping that will begin to change. I've been able to get in a couple of weekends in the last month and I've been focusing on the chop for my leg vise.

You say, "But Andrew, that chop shouldn't take that long to make!" You're right. It shouldn't. [pause] Yeah. You're right. [sigh]

Ok, here's another story of why working in very short spurts on an irregular basis is a bad idea.

So, when I ordered the wood for the bench, I figured on some of it for the chop on my leg vise. It was some of the same 7/4 hard maple stuff I was using for the bench top. If you go back to my big burst of activity in March, in the famous Bacon Explosion entry, I talk about gluing up the two pieces I had set aside, not getting the clamping right, and leaving a gap where there was supposed to be spring, etc... I then glued up two other pieces I had lying about that were not as nice as the first two, mainly because I was too tired to rip through the original pair, plane down the original joint, and re-glue. At the time, it seemed good enough.

Well, fast forward to this summer since not much happened between the dates. I began to flatten out the chop on my new bench using my wagon vise (which works wonderfully, by the way). A quick note on what I'm using for bench dogs. I ended up using soft poplar-like dowels I got at the Borg for bench dogs. I love them. What ends up happening is that they slightly deform and become a bit flat on one side. That helps with the holding without me having to figure out just how much flatness should be there and doing it myself. It's a more organic method. (LOL)

It's pretty amazing that I can clamp tight enough to deform the wood, but they don't show any signs of breaking or cracking. The wood is much tougher than I thought it would be. And I've also had them sticking up quite high (four inches or so) and even then they were fine. They're not always quite the right diameter so some are a little smaller than the 3/4" hole. To solve that I put a very small ball catch into the side of the dog which gives just enough pressure to keep the dog from slipping through the hole. It all works great. I'll do a short post on that one of these days.

You can see the slight deformation of the dog in the image below. I'm holding a big board tight enough to do some pretty serious transfers planing without having to use my hold fasts. The wagon vise holds it firmly enough.

Back to the chop. So, I've got this big hunk of hard maple for my chop. I flatten and flatten it. I'm really beginning to hate hard maple.

I'm in a hurry when I finally get it flat and I cut it to the tapered shape and start to smooth out the saw marks from the sides. With the glancing light you can really see the low spots. They're not nearly so obvious without the flash.

You can see on the last one that I had already but a slight bevel around the edge to see how that well that might work, and to reduce the amount of surface area I had to flatten. I'm not sure that's a good idea, because it doesn't reduce it that much, but what it does do is throw off the dimensions of your bevel. But that's not quite the problem here, as the more observant who are familiar with the original plans may be able to tell. The shape is wrong.

What I ended up cutting was an elongated trapezoid with the angled sides extending straight all the way from one corner to another. The original design, and I think for very good reason, has a square section at the top for the actual chop, which then tapers down the leg to the parallel guide at the bottom.

At this point I have to make a decision: mistake or design opportunity? I hold the chop up to the leg and try to envision it being used, how well it would hold, the potential drawbacks and advantages(?) of such a shape. It just doesn't look or feel right. To now cut a square top out of this piece would mean it would end up too narrow, so it looks like I'm starting over. This is always the moment to put everything down, step away from the bench and take a break.

As I'm trying to figure out where to go from here (is now the right time to rip apart that original bad glue job, or do I need to take another trip to the lumber store?) I remember a hunk of wood I've been carting around for quite a while. We all have something like that. A piece of unusual or just interesting wood you keep thinking you'll use for something, but never get around to it. For me, it's a (relatively) big hunk of mahogany I picked out of a scrap bin. It's 40" long, 12" wide and just over 8/4. It has a couple of knots and some chips off the edges. It also is still rough sawn, but it was free, and mahogany. Oh, and did I mention the sap wood, etc...? I picked this up when I really didn't know any better, and it was free.

As I'm flattening it, I can definitely tell this is NOT hard maple. It takes some work, as the board is also twisted and cupped. (I'm starting to really understand why it was in the cut-off bin even though it was so large) It's got a big ol' knot in the middle of one side but even that planes pretty easily. Did I mention it was free?

I get it pretty much flattened up, very carefully mark it up and then cut out the basic outlines. I leave a fair amount at the edges because at this point I'm being overly cautious and insecure.

I plane down the excess I left on the board using the cutoff as a wedge underneath the side of the board. This is where I use the wooden dogs set pretty high up the sides.

I tried a few of my planes including a circa 1940's Miller Falls(?), #6C-type, Craftsman plane, and finally ended up with my trusty newer Stanley #6 with a Hock blade. You can see the nice shavings I was eventually getting in the picture above. I have a special fondness for the #6 as they are generally depricated by followers of Mr. Leach since he equated them with the Prince of Darkness and declared them useless. This makes them cheap, but they're still big hunks of iron and do a good job of being a big jack plane for flattening large surfaces like my bench top, and can do duty as a short joiner on smaller edges like my vise chop. And once I put the Hock blade in my crappy Stanley it works beautifully.

Craftsman plane. Notice original sticker on handle.

Stanley with Hock blade.

Once I got the sides down to dimensions, I started putting the bevel on the edges and do a final smoothing of the faces. For the smoothing I pulled out a great old Type 11 Stanley #5 Jack plane with its sweetheart iron. I tried my Miller Falls smoother, but it just didn't do as nearly a nice a job as my jack plane, so that's what I stuck with. As Kent Beck would say, "Do more of works and less of what doesn't."

And here it is propped up where it will eventually go. I've left a little extra at the bottom so when I chop out the mortise for the parallel guide I have some extra heft and hopefully avoid blowing out the bottom.

And speaking of the parallel guide, I needed to make one of those as well. I just used a piece of straight-grained, 1x4, southern yellow pine that's been in my workshop for quite a while. I marked around it to the dimensions that I wanted which I determined by what would fit into the slot I already cut in the bottom of the leg. I planed it down with my Stanley #6 with the Hock iron, this time set a bit more aggressively.

When I attacked the edge, from which I needed to take a good 1/2", I thought I'd try out my German scrub plane on the job for which it was supposedly designed. I'm not so sure I buy that theory. It was really difficult to keep the scrub on the narrow edge. It resulted in me cutting a nice, shallow gouge out of my finger as I slipped off the edge of the board. I ended up going back to the big Stanley with great success. I did notice, though, the bench's first blood.

It's not much, but I hope it's enough to appease the bench gods who always demand a sacrifice for the new bench, just as my kitchen knife gods demand a blood sacrifice for every new knife I get. I tend to only need to give one sacrifice per knife, so hopefully this will mean I will not need to bleed on my bench again.

One more new thing I was able to do with my bench which was use my wagon vise to hold the parallel guide for planing off the end grain markings. The vise holds things really well in this position. I think I'll have to use this for small drawer and box sides. Another plus for the wagon vise.

Next time, whenever that will be, I will start the harrowing process of cutting the mortise for the parallel guide and pinning it in place. And, of course, boring the holes and cutting it to size, first. This time I will take my time and make sure I don't have to do it all over again. A lesson I seem to need to learn several times each project.

But it's getting closer. Once I have the leg vise in place and working, I will finally dismantle my old bench and have a lot more room in my tiny workshop. Then I can make the sliding deadman and the planing stop. (which I should probably make next, but so far I've not missed it with my great wagon vise)

I might get some shop time this coming weekend, but then not for a while. It will be time for fall gardening and we have a bunch of trees and shrubs to move, and we have a two-week vacation in there somewhere to Flagstaff, Arizona, so there may not be much activity for a while. But then once all that is over with, I suspect I'll get a bit more regular shop time as gardening shuts down for the winter.

AAAndrew

Pictures of the Process, Part 4

What a way to end a weekend of intense work. Yesterday I ran over to Woodcraft and got some little pinpoint gluers. I also called Titebond (Franklin) and talked to one of their good technical service people. He told me that Titebond III, which I had used for the initial glueup, does glue to itself, so his recommendation was to use the same glue.

I spread the joint a little bit with my beater glueing chisel (a modern, plastic-handled chisel I use for nasty jobs like cleaning up dried glue), drilled a few 3/32" holes into the joint from the back of the bench top, and proceeded to use the pinpoint gluers, which are long, thin metal tips attached to a little accordion-style glue bottle, to apply LOTS more glue. I squirted as much as I could into the drill holes, and then up at the end block for the wagon vise, I just came at it from every angle and was able to get the metal tips all the way into the joint and just flood it with glue.

Here's the split. The far right board on the edge is board 1, then you have board two and then three as you move into the top. The split was between board one and two below the wagon vise, and the between three and four at the end block for the wagon vise.





Arrrgh!

In the end I glued it up and put the clamps on and let it sit for about 12 hours. (yes, I did this first thing in the morning)



I was also very worried about glue squeeze out running into the wagon vise, so I taped over the gap with duct tape, which happens to be red, don't ask. This seems to have worked pretty good. There was squeeze out but the duct tape held it back enough that what little got through was easy enough to scrape off. My main worry was that I'd glue my vise chop into place!




Now that the crisis has been covered, let's go back and see what lead up to it. And you'll see how much work went into the top that morning, which made it all the more heartbreaking when the split happened. But I guess better now than when I went to clamp the first board in the wagon vise.

First thing I did that morning was to cut the ends off of the top. I used my c. 1917-1940 Disston D8 cut to 8tpi. It is a real trooper of a saw.



I had to get up on top of the bench to start the cut. I wanted to see the cut clearly. If I had more than one saw bench (yeah, yeah, I know) then I could have tried to haul the giant slab o' wood onto those, but this worked as well.



Starting the cut



Keeping to the line pretty well, at least from this angle.



You can see up where the cut started, just past the fourth board, and back at the corner where I cut a relieving cut so it didn't splinter out at the end, I actually cut a little out of perpendicular to the top. I'll be focusing on that when I break out my end grain planing operation.





I tried starting the cut from the floor when I did the other side and tried to keep it straighter up and down. I found the first four boards actually made this more difficult in the end. As you can see, I also flipped the bench to be able to saw this side right-handed. You can see the long slot for the sliding deadman down the front of the bench.




The next big operation was to cut the giant mortises into the top to fit the tenons on the ends of the legs. I tried all kinds of things, including a couple of big t-augers I have. I'll tell ya', that hard maple is more than a match for any of that stuff. I ended up, as I mentioned in my earlier post, drilling lots of smaller (1/2") holes around the perimeter of the mortise and then chopping out the rest of it. I did try on one mortise just boring out holes on just one end to give some relief and then chopping out the rest with my big mortise chisel. That ended up being a whole lot of work, which chips flying everywhere in the shop.



loved this little curl spit out by the bit.



Next time (ha!), I will make sure there is sufficient space between the end of the wagon vise and the mortise for the leg. As you can see the wall between the two is very thin and it blue out a little bit. I don't think it really hurts the integrity of the top, but I would have felt better with more wood between the two gaps.







These mortises are two-inches deep, two inches wide and five inches long. That's a lot of wood to take out.



This is when I finally figured out the best way to do this, and of course it was the last one. You can see the big chunk I was able to pop out. You can also see the drip of sweat on the wood. Between sawing and these mortises, I definitely got my workout for the day!



Once I got all the mortises cut, I went to fit the base to the top. I first put a bevel on the tops of the tenons to help ease them into the mortises.



I fiddled a bit and got the tenons in pretty tightly but couldn't quite make them go in all the way. This is when I flipped the bench onto the floor. (that was an adventure!)





And it was while I was trying to pound the tenons into place that the split happened. All of which I covered above. After all that work, you can see why when the top split I just put my tools down and walked away for the rest of the night. I had put in a good 8+ hours in the shop of hard work and I was tired, discouraged, hungry, sore and ready to stop.

While the split was drying (the next day), I glued up the boards for the leg vise chop. I also was reminded why I have a love/hate relationship with my Jorgenson clamps.



I planed out a little spring into the boards, put plenty of glue on and clamped them in. Or at least I thought I had. When I went back to take it out of the clamps I discovered that I hadn't actually tightened the middle clamp or the one on the end. They felt tight because I hadn't tilted the handles correctly and just tightened away until the handle wouldn't move any more. It wasn't tightened, it was just screwed all the way back while still in loose sliding mode. It's hard to describe, but if you have clamps like these you know what I'm talking about. So, I ended up with a nice little gap right down the middle of the boards where the spring was. AAAARRRGGGHH!!

So, after doing this again (I did have spares this time!) I got it right. One of the boards is a 1/16" out of true in the middle, it's a bit bent, but that I can deal with on a 7/4 thick board.



At that point I started to make my dinner. I felt I deserved a bit of a treat for all the hard work so I made myself a Bacon Explosion. (Look it up) It's basically a woven mat of bacon, stuffed with Italian sausage with cooked bacon in the middle. It's then slow cooked and eaten in slices. It's like smokey, spicy meatloaf, and quite good. I used a Caribbean rub instead of the BBQ sauce.












After my late, but very delicious, dinner, I went back up to the shop and very carefully fitted the tenons into the mortises. I never forced anything, and ended up cleaning out one of the mortises a little more, and taking some off of the tenons where it was rubbing, etc... In other words, all the stuff I should have done the first time. This time was a little easier because I had the top down on the floor sitting on four wooden blocks so I could get my fingers underneath it to lift it when I needed to. (Good idea!!) And in the end, Voila!





Here's the underside of the wagon vise. You can see the blow out of the thin wall between the mortise and the wagon vise on the left, and the squeeze out of the glue from the re-glue of the end block on the right. Not so pretty, but damn it, it works!



I couldn't resist getting out my #6 with a Hock iron and taking some cross passes on the bench. Sweet! It is going to flatten out nicely, and will be another source of a good workout.



AAAndrew