Motor Club of America Online: Workbench #7: Leg vise

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Workbench #7: Leg vise

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Got sick a little and can’t work in the shop, so it’s time to blog
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In total I spent quite a bit time working on leg vise, but to my excuse I had to built most of the parts from scratch except for Jim Ritter’s (aka Boatman53) chain mechanism . I’m more than happy with this chain-driven vise and highly recommend it. Jim, thank you a lot for all your effort to send your kit up here to Russia!
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Ok, leg vise implies that there must be something done with the leg to make it work.

Front side of the leg.

Cutting recess for the low-friction plastic washer:

Screw works as some primitive depth gauge to mark depth of the recess. Simple and very useful.

Drilling perfectly centered holes for the screws:

Ready:

To be honest I’m not sure this low-friction washer affects operation of the vise. But anyway it’s there, and I’m not going to throw it away.

Another part on leg’s front side is a roller to support parallel guide.

Piece by piece:

Installed:

As you can guess I bolted it through to be dead sure it won’t move. And I think it’s worth the effort ‘cause legs wood (pine) is very soft.
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Now quick look on the back side of the leg.

Screw nut and chain sprocket:

Lower chain sprocket and yet another support of parallel guide:

Many people build some additional support for the parallel guide, so I decided to build one as well. Here’s what I came up with:

I have to say it works just nicely:

Clamping surface of the chop stays parallel to workbench front surface unless I apply some serious torque on the wheel.

Lower sprocket brackets are also bolted through, see square nuts cut into the leg above parallel guide slot:

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Now it’s time to mount a wheel.

Thrust bearings for the win! The bottom screw of the garter is fake.

When fitting a mounting screw through the main screw I eventually made it too loose, so that I had to dent couple of dots to move the metal and so to make it nice and tight:

Also mounting screw is not perfectly co-axial to the main screw, and it goes into its place only when wheel and the screw are in some certain position. To ease their positioning I dented dots on the wheel and on the screw:

After some time I realized that thrust bearings get too dusty very quickly. To address the issue I made some protecting hoop:

And a wheel handle finally:

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I guess this is it. As I already mentioned I’m pretty happy with my leg vise. 20cm/8” of clamping capacity. Nice and smooth in operation. Insanely strong. What else one needs?