Wedge Vise

I have a machinist's vise, which works great, and I've recently made a set of wood jaws for it--maybe I'll point them out in a future post--so I can get by, but what I really needed was a bench vise to hold stock in place for planing, chisel work, etc. so I made this simple wedge vise. Actually, I made two, you can see the smaller, vertical wedge vise mounted to the face of the bench for clamping boards vertically. In the first image, you can see that I have small board tapped into the vise on edge, but an even better idea, would be a third type of wedge vise for working the edges, as shown in this Rockler article.

The draw backs of this system is lack of flexibility. The size of wood these units can handle is based on how far apart the jaws of the vise are set. I tried to pick a size that works for me, but I still end up blocking the vise with scraps to make up the difference in wood sizes.

Using the vise is simple. The stock is placed flat on the bench, with one end against the fixed jaw, and then the wedge is tapped in place with a wooden mallet. To release, just tap on the other end. Once a piece is in the vise, the whole bench will move when the clamped stock is shaken, so it really holds.

I made my vise out of 5/4 pine scrap. The long angle is 15-degrees, if I remember correctly, and its back-cut at 30 to 35-degrees, so that when you tap the wedge in place, it dives in under the fixed jaw and won't work loose. I cut the mated pieces out of one scrap on my compound miter saw, and then just screwed the fixed jaws to the bench. As you can see, my bench is 3/4-inch plywood sheathing on a frame of old 2x framing lumber, so I can beat on it (and screw things to it!)

This system won't take the place of a nice bench vise and some bench dogs, but until the time I get something like that, this is what I'll stick with. Since I took these photos, I've added a few bench dogs to help with clamping different sized pieces, including a set that runs perpendicular, so that I can drop in a scrap, and use the vise for edge work as I mentioned above. So far, so good!