Ken,
Could you please explain why? I see that it will have little capacity but clamping force should be tremendous since shoulder ratio is so significant.
BTW, it just struck me that any kind of parallel guide limits chop movement not only on the vertical axis but also right-to-left. Thanks Ken! Like with peg board side of the rail mortise and sides of the pin/peg will limit side-to-side racking while clamping vertical board. With criss-cross there are axles... So I finally realized why racking is not a big deal for clamping vertical boards.
Gonna try sloped one anyway, I just fascinated with mechanics of clamping with angled vise.
I'm pretty sure that is just one of his hand drawn doodles. There are a lot of photos of actual leg vises in the book. It's much more of a historical bench tour than Chris Schwarz's books. The Workbench Book by Scott Landis, Taunton Press 1987. Picked it up at a local library book sale a few years back. Has good drawings of Frank Klaus's bench.
Dojo Kun, 1: Be humble and polite.
Having just read Chris Schwarz's discussion of the leg vice on a Roubo bench in the Roubo book, it seems even the parallel guide isn't a must have, especially if you make the chop for the leg vise longer.
Eric
Ken,
I would never have guessed that you were a fan of the Moravian design, well....I wouldn't have if you hadn't mentioned it so often (just kidding.)
However, I have very much appreciated the posts on it, and also your evaluation of the Moravian vs Roubo. My first bench will be fairly light duty. However it will be my only real bench until I build my first heavy duty bench, and that will almost certainly be a Moravian. The light duty bench will primarily use lumber I already have, a vise I already have (it was my dad's vise), and so the price will be right, and it will be my main and only real bench for a while. It will be eventually used for a mobile vise for primarily finish carpentry and as an assembly table.
That said, the first heavy duty bench will almost certainly be a Moravian, and will also take over as a travel bench for more heavy duty carpentry. It will be about the size of the one you first built to travel with you, about 6' long so it can travel in the back of a short bed truck, or inside our van or my Jimmy.
At any rate, thank you very much for the interesting and very informative posts on building the bench, and your comments on the plus/minus points of the bench versus the Roubo were very instructive. Those comments were the last nail in making me think the Moravian is the way to go for the first (and maybe final if it will do everything I need) heavy duty bench.
Thanks and regards,
Stew
Last edited by Stew Denton; 12-06-2018 at 10:42 PM.
Stew,
As I have posted, before deciding to build a large version of the bench I worked on the small portable version alongside the big French/English bench. I found for most tasks I enjoyed working on the small bench more that the large one. The only tasks it fell short were sawing across the bench and I think a good part of that was because I made the bench narrow to fit into the side bins of the motorhome. A wider version of the small bench or a sand bag would likely cure that shortcoming.
Good luck when you decide to build,
ken
Ken,
Your comment on the width is duly noted. For moving around stuff for carpentry you want things reasonable to move around even if you want it reasonably stout if possible, but, I am not a real big guy and not nearly as young as I used to be so.....it's always a compromise on size, and strength and weight, versus portability.
On the other hand I want the bench to be as generally useful as possible, so I may make the first Moravian up to 2' wide, maybe a bit less, I will have to figure up what it will weigh. Part of the time you just need a set up to clamp a miter box to for carpentry. Moving around planks and multiple sawhorses is a pain, and the flexibility of that kind of set up is limited without lots of cobbling up stuff to hold things....but come to think of it, that is what I still do for almost any project I work on.
Stew