Leg Vise Roller Guides

[Brendan Dahl]

I recently completed my roubo(seen at http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?124750-Show-us-your-Bench&p=1745971#post1745971 ). Overall I am really happy with the bench, but the leg vise was not very smooth. I'm not sure if I screwed something up but I tried playing with the size of the mortise for the parallel guide by making it bigger and smaller but nothing seemed to help. I had some free time last weekend so I decided to try and make my own little roller guides similar to the benchcrafted ones. I used some little hard plastic rollers from the hardware store and just made the blocks from some scrap doug fir. One thing about mine that is different from the benchcrafted setup is that I made a mortise for the front roller guide so I didn't have to chop down my leg vise. My leg is over 5" thick so I wasn't too worried about weakening it.

For setting it up I followed the benchrafted manual which has some good advice. After the finicky setup process the leg vise now operates quite nicely. Its probably no where near the benchcrafted smoothness but for $7 dollars in hardware it was big improvement.
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[Andrae Covington]

Cool. I had to enlarge the parallel guide mortise in the leg on mine, but that seemed to be more of a misalignment of the distance between the screw and the mortise and the screw and the parallel guide. I like the idea of mortising the roller guide into the leg.

[george wilson]

Looks good!!

[John Petsche]

Nice roller setup