Veritas Twin Screw Vise

Re: Veritas Twin Screw Vise

John Lucas

>Frank

I'm interested in this. I bought one and used it for years but when I moved my shop into an un airconditioned basement the wood movement made it bind up. It still works but is very tight. I made the jaws out of solid Oak. Thought that would be tough but didn't take into account any woodmovement problems. One of my plans for this summer is to fix that vise along with mounting a new vise on the other end of my bench.

Re: Veritas Twin Screw Vise

Bart Goldberg

>I just bought this vise to install in my as yet unfinished Work Bench. I'd really like to hear about others experience with it.

Bart

Captured nuts or no? (long & boring)

Wiley Horne--Glendora CA

>Hi Frank,

By the way, that blanket chest with the frame-and-panel sides is magnificent--no wonder your wife wanted to get into the game!

On the captured nut thing, I have to admit I'm an analog guy in a digital age, and it'll take a while to get pictures. However it's easy to talk about. The subject is how to attach the rear jaw of a twin-screw vise to the bench top. Lee Valley includes some beautiful hardware for the purpose, which includes a 3/8" (IIRC) bolt and a cylindrical nut, which has to be let in from the bottom of the benchtop in just the right place to intersect the bolt hole coming from the end. I am saving LV's nice hardware for a future bedframe, and decided to go another way. LV has solid thinking about this, particularly for an end vise installation, because you have differential movement between the rear jaw and the bench top. Plus you're bolting into the end grain of the benchtop. So you can see their point.

I had two twin-screws to mount, and wanted to clamp flush, so I made a big skirt which runs along the front of the bench and wraps around the end. This skirt serves as the rear jaw for however many twin-screws you want, and the advantage is that there's no standoff of the vise from the benchfront--you're clamping flush when edge-jointing. It's a hard maple skirt about 2-5/8" thick by 8-1/4" deep. The 6-foot front span and the 30" end piece are dovetailed together where they make a corner. So there's this big L-shaped heavy dude to mount to the benchtop, which is 2-1/4" fingerjointed maple from Highland Hdwe sitting on 2x6 framing.

I decided to just lag bolt that L-shaped skirt onto the benchtop. Used 3/8" x 5-1/2" lag screws about a foot apart all around. They're counterbored an inch, so the screw has 4" of bite into the benchtop. Piloted with a 21/64" bit, and counterbored 7/8" which is what is needed to get a socket onto the bolt head to tighten it.

Well, so far the skirt hasn't fallen off, loosened up, or been ripped asunder by differential movement of the benchtop. So I'm glad I still have the nice captured nut hardware for a bedframe.

Wiley

Re: Captured nuts or no? (long & boring)

Frank Mutchler in Colorado Springs

>Thanks for the kind words & comments, Wiley. How does the 8 1/4" skirt affect the use of bench dogs? How did you mount the top to the base? Does the base contain drawers, etc?

I noticed on Bob Keys bench that he mounted his LV TS Vise with a deep rear jaw that is part of the apron but at the end of the jaw the apron is reduced to about 4". I thought he might have done that to facilitate dog use??

Re: Captured nuts or no? (long & boring)

William Duffield on the Cohansey

>You might need a stick to push them back up from the bottom :^). Also, the wide face (as in the Nicholson benches at Williamsburg) means you don't need to go find and set up your board jack for any but the widest boards. Also, hold-downs (hold-ins, in this case, maybe) can be driven into the skirt for holding boards on end or on edge. OTOH, if you like to use clamps to hold work down to the top of your bench at the front, a wide front skirt just about obviates the use of most handscrews to to this.

Re: Captured nuts or no? (long & boring)

Wiley Horne--Glendora CA

>Frank,

Attached is the only photo I have available. It shows just the right front corner, where the two skirt pieces are dovetailed together. That's a C&W moving filletster. The bench is up against a wall. That black circle on the skirt is an ebony plug filling one of the counterbores for the lag bolts.

You can also see the LV holdfast. There are two of those which are more or less permanent fixtures on the skirt. There is a twin-screw down at the left end of the bench (I am left handed), and longer boards being edge jointed have their off-end held to the skirt by one of these holdfasts. Of course, if you prefer the hammer-in kind, they would work fine too. Short sticks--anything 3' or under--gets held by a vise only, usually this end one, and I plane toward the wall.

You can see an LV 4" brass bench dog in the front jaw of the end vise. There are two ways to go: Make the dog holes a little less deep than the dogs, so the dogs don't get lost, and clean chips out of the holes from time to time with about a 15mm #7 fishtail gouge (or whatever). That's what I do. The other way is drill right through so that chips clear, and if the dog gets lost, punch it up from the bottom like Bill said with a screwdriver (or whatever). If you use a skirt, and if you laminate it, and if you want square dogs, remember to cut the dogholes before glue-up. Otherwise, you're gonna drill for round dogs afterward. Also, you want those dogs near the edge. Mine are centered 2" in from the edge, and if I had it to do over, I'd center 'em more like 1-1/2" or 1-1/4" in. Not a big deal, but you want to get it right because they're in constant use. There are any number of times when you're edge jointing, let's say, a 4-foot stile which is 2" wide. I like to catch a stick like that between the dogs to joint it. That's when I wish the dog holes were a little closer to the edge, so I'm not leaning in an extra inch.

Bill mentioned about clamping near the bench front. That skirt overhangs by 2-5/8", which provides purchase for clamping, so I'm always using a Bessey 12" clamp, for example, when clamping the tails board down onto the pins board which is held vertically in the end vise at that corner in the picture.

Wiley

P.S. on drawers (also long)

Wiley Horne--Glendora CA

>Underneath the skirt section, there are 9 drawers. The interior framing is 4x4 posts at about 2-foot centers, with 2x6 joists and other framing let into the posts. Altogether this understructure forms 3 bays, so there are three bays with 3 drawers in each. Drawers are 7" to 7-1/2". Now I wish I had made 15 drawers, including a bunch of shallower ones. So now am making a separate piece of shop furniture with a lot of shallow drawers in it.

Wiley

Boy, Wiley!

Frank Mutchler in Colorado Springs

>That's a beautiful bench corner!! Your construction is pretty much what I've got in mind. 3 bays w/drawers. Thanks for sharing your ideas for improving the bench.

I like your idea about blind bench dog holes. A shot of air should clear them pretty quickly. Have you ever seen a dog with a cross pin that would keep it from getting lost in the hole?

I've got a bathroom vanity to do and then a complete kitchen (only 14 cabinets..all cherry) and after that maybe I'll get to do my bench. SWMBO is patiently waiting for her new kitchen as well!

I haven't heard anything negative regarding the LV TS Vise from folks that actually have it and use it. Wouldn't affect my decision to use them but if there are problems it would be nice to not have to reinvent the wheel. Here, I think it's a case of no news is good news. Thanks again for that beautiful picture!

Hey, I'm there on those

Wiley Horne--Glendora CA

>SWMBO demands. Mine cannot understand why I am 'piddling around' (can you believe she would say such a thing?!) making a sharpening station with drawers and paneled doors, etc. etc., when there is actual work to be done in the house. And the yard. There's a real hardball executive management school they all go to, I'm convinced of it.

On the dogs, the Lee Valley ones have a spring-loaded wire in the side and they don't fall down the hole. Likewise, I seem to recall that folks who make their own wooden ones usually put some kind of spring loaded friction device in them. My own experience is that 'operator error' is the real culprit in sinking dogs: The owner, me, will push the dogs down too far in the heat of action, or else they need to be set deep because of shallow stock being planed. Then I have to grab a pair of vice grips to pull them back up. So for this reason, I think it's better to drill straight on through, which gives you chip clearance, and it's no big deal to punch em back up with a screwdriver or piece of dowel (hey, you could even have a special tool for this). I just haven't gotten a round tuit yet. But the main point is that the dogs themselves do not have a tendency to sink in and get lost.

Wiley

Re: P.S. on drawers (also long)

Rob Lee

>Wiley -

Have you thought of drifting a horizontal "cleaning" hole through to the bottom of your blind dog holes??

Cheers -

Rob

PS- I'd really avoid using compressed air to blow out blind holes, as suggested further on down this thread... once you've had your corneas "drilled" to remove splinter residue (steel, in this case) with a pseudo dentist's drill, you tend to avoid things like that...

I second that!

Brad in Ottawa

>I have the twin screw vise myself, mounted on my state of the art 2x4/MDF bench that someone was going to toss.

I don't have much in the way of suggestions for mounting but I did drill the blind dog holes on the vise with horizontal holes in to help clear the debris.

The one thing I love about that bench is that I can try all sorts of experiments regarding bench dogs, vise placements etc... to prepare for my next bench.

Brad

Re: I second that!

Frank Mutchler in Colorado Springs

>Brad, have you used a Record, Wilton, or any other face vise? If so, are there features you like about them that aren't available on the twin screw? (other than quick release)

Being able to drop a board down the center of the twin screw w/o hitting a screw has to be a great advantage for sawing dt's??

Another dog trick

Roger Nixon

>Great bench, Wiley. I expected no less from you and I hoped you would chime in on the vise racking thread.

One other way to use dogs shorter than the skirt/apron is to drill a hole that is smaller in diameter than the dog from the bottom of the dog hole though the bottom of the skirt. Put in a gutter spike or similar object that will extend below the skirt 1/4" or so and then install the dog. This will let you push the dog up if it gets pushed below the surface of the bench.

Bench dog ideas

Wiley Horne--Glendora CA

>Hi Rob,

Great idea--thanks! I think on balance, I'm gonna follow Roger Nixon's suggestion below, and extend the blind 3/4" holes straight on through with a long 5/8" auger. Then I can stop humiliating my fishtail gouge with doghole cleaning duties.

Best wishes to all at LV and your Dad,

Wiley

Re: I second that!

Brad in Ottawa

>Frank,

Been a busy week!

I checked out a few other vise models at the LV store here in Ottawa. They are all set up to examine.

The quick release is the only feature that you may conceivably miss on the Twin Screw. I don't though, it isn't often that I am required to open/close the vise huge distances. Even then the twin screw operates smoothly and quickly.

The twin screw offered more versatility:

-Capable of being skewed to firmly hold tapered pieces

-You named the biggest advantage, dropping wood between the screws rather than to one side of a screw. So much more versatility! Like many others, when I cut dovetails I move the board so that my cuts are perpendicular to the ground. It just seems so much more natural, and centred with a twin screw.

I also liked the wide area vise being used in combination with bench dogs. I don't use it often but it is an option if I need it.

The only consideration I have for the bench when I build a heavier one is where to put the twin screw (Face or Tail??) I haven't set out to design the bench yet and will likely experiment on my FrankenBench before I make that decision.

Great decision on the twin screw!

Brad

PS Hope this isn't too confusing... I have been winding down a hectic week here! (Looking forward to the weekend!!!!)

Re: Bench dog ideas

Rob Lee

>Wiley -

I'd go with the reduced holes too - it's a more elegant solution...

Dad's keeping busy - see the post I'm just about to make above (only look at the site after lunch ).

Cheers,

Rob