One Day Project

My face vise stunk.

I made it out of scrap wood left over from the benchtop. The wood itself is soft, I drilled the holes sloppily, and it's a little thin. All of these factors led to a really flexy vise with a lot of slop.

Along with the walnut and maple that I used for the bookcase, I also picked up a grab bag of scrap cutoffs from Peachtree Lumber. One of the real gems in it was this:

It's a 2" thick piece of what I'm quite sure is tulip poplar. It was really cupped, but I handplaned it down nice and flat. Poplar is a pretty soft wood which should make it nice for holding smaller, delicate pieces. I ripped it down the middle into two pieces.

The sloppy drilling on the original vise jaw was the result of the vise not coming with a template to help layout exactly where the holes go. I sort of eyeballed it. I thought of a better solution this time:

I took the vise apart and used the jaw itself as the template. The metal piece at the bottom of the picture is where all the rods end, so I just used that to space all my holes perfectly.

Now that's a vise!

Here's a closeup of the beautiful grain of the poplar:

I like it. It works better too.

I'm probably going to do a little surgery on the actual bench itself to make it even a little more rigid, but that will be another day.

In the last post I mentioned my affinity for Bosch tools. Well, apparently someone at Bosch is paying attention because immediately a free Bosch plunge-cut blade for my oscillating tool showed up in the mail. I'm not kidding.

Now, this might have something to do with an Internet special promotion I signed up for a while ago...but maybe the tool industry has recognized the influence I wield with this blog and is engaging in a little *wink**wink**nod**nod* quid pro quo.

If that is the case, let me just take this space to express how much I continue to enjoy Bosch power tools...and Lie-Nielsen hand tools...and Lee Valley...and Spax screws...and Gramercy saws...and I've never used them but I hear Festool power tools are really nice. Also, a lot of the wood that God makes is really awesome. All my readers should go buy as much of all these things as possible.

I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.