My Little shaving Pony 1 of 4
Todd O. Cronkhite Maine Native, Presently Away
>Well, I went out and built a working model of the shaving horse. I have discovered that making mockups first is a real good idea. I went out into my stash and selected two raggety ol' 2x4's to build this out of. Even looking as rough as it does it works fine, so I can only imagine how it'll work once I make it out of decent wood.
The one thing that wasn't mentioned in anything I read about this vise, and perhaps it is because it's a no brainer to everybody but me, but in order for the vise to clamp the Work, it must extend beneath the pivot dowel of the upper jaw.
I used Chris's article as a guide and just went at it. My holes are 15/16", vs. his 5/8, because that was roughly the size of the dowel I had on hand. Still I had to shave it down to fit in the holes, and no, it didn't occur to me that I could shave it down to 5/8 until after I bored the holes. I used a spade bit to bore the holes and didn't use a back support, thus the blow out, but that's of no matter since this was meant to be a mockup if you will. I'm not going to get into demensions as it should be pretty easy to see what I used, and your may vary from mine due to differences in vise and your height. I will say that I had at first made the jaws a bit to long, and had to shorten them to be more effective.
At any rate here it is:
