DIY Chain Driven Bench Vise | How To

this is a DIY high base and we're going to build another one in today's video this one I have gears in that drive both the threaded Rod that are top and bottom so it's a one-handed operation but in the High vice we're building today we're going to use chain and sprocket which is pretty accessible and easier for others to do we're doing something really unique today because we're using a new material that I've never worked with we're going to use hempwood to build a high Vise if I was being 100 honest if I wasn't making a YouTube video about this upcoming build I probably would not have finished it in this project I decided to use hempwood because I thought it would be pretty and I know a temp would because I went to a hempwood website bought the hemp wood from them and then the box that came in also says hempwood so we're going to make the assumption that this is actually hemp wood and it is a nightmare to work with fortunately the hardware side of this was really easy I ordered some wood clamp Hardware from Taylor toolworks this has a double threaded Rod so the threads are on both sides and going opposite directions which means for every turn of the handle I get double the movement in the Vise then I use some chain and some sprockets I got off of Amazon that made this whole thing kind of connect together that was pretty straightforward I'm really glad at the beginning of this project I decided to laminate some sapili to the hemp wood before we got started with the build now this is a long build and I didn't make a plan set so I did kind of almost a step-by-step video so it's a little bit longer than I would normally do and we're going to do it voice over Style just to make it easier for me to edit to get this High vice started the first thing I needed to do was resaw down some sapili for gluing to the hemp wood now to do that I just ran it through my planer I'm not worried about getting it perfect just kind of good so I can run it through the Harvey bandsaw to reside now this is a new resource setup for me and it works phenomenal first of all I'm using the Harvey 15-inch three horsepower bandsaw I've got a Carter tools green wood resaw blade in there it's the 5 8 3 TPI and I'm using the bow products uh tall feather board and this just made it so easy to resaw when I went back to playing it I took off less than 30 seconds of an inch and I only had to run it through one time and I had a nice clean board after that was all done ran over to the table saw real quick just to cut these things down to their working size this isn't finished size this is just the working size that I'm going to use for the glue up now this is where things kind of all started to go wrong I'm a little bit of a sloppy glue up guy I can be because we use hdp workbench so I just wipe right up it's really easy and I got a little bit in between this next glue up which you'll see causes some problems in the very near future so right off the bat I want to admit that we just have a new camera set up and I didn't get the audio setup right so there's no tool noise in the background or the voiceover I'm going to add a little bit of music so it's not just my voice that you have to listen to let me know in the comments section below whether you hate it or love it and I'll consider that when I'm doing voice over work in the future [Music] after the glued all set up I went over to our flip cart we have a video on this really handy flip cart that we have for our planer and jointer um I'll put a link at the end of the video so you can check it out now I'm just cleaning up the edges on one Edge so I have a nice Square Edge and then I'm going to take it over to the table saw and then cut everything down to the final sizes that I need now I start by cutting one Edge adjacent to the planed Edge and then I flip it around and cut that edge again one of the things I was noticing with the planer is it was pulling a little bit of that hempwood material out and when I separated the pieces that we glued together earlier I just gotten a drop of glue in between the two hempwood pieces and on this side that first side wasn't too bad I just chiseled it off but on the other side it pulled a big chunk of the hemp wood out normally you know with regular wood you don't even think about this because it's just easy to sand off or clean up so I filled up those big gaps with the Goodfellow wood filler which is our favorite this is just the beginning of the hempwood problems a lot of tear out a lot of little things that just caused a lot of issues with this [Music] foreign fortunately at the end it looked really really good so I've got a couple of duplicate pieces that I have to cut so I'm going to go ahead and put double-sided tape down CA glue a little bit of instant adhesive spray stuff and sandwich those together so I'm gonna effectively cut the amount of joinery work or trimming work I have to do in half [Music] with the two pieces or the front and back of the Vise glued together I cut it to its final length which is 18 inches so the overall size of this is four inches wide and 18 inches tall and this is both the front and back of the Vise to start layout I'm laying out all the threaded rods through the center so two inches on Center and about 10 inches apart so I'm coming up about two inches from the bottom for the bottom hole and another 10 inches up from that so about 12 inches in total now marking the center holes for these are using the all the for the drill points was tricky as well because it's so fibrous even the all wanted to walk in different directions I'm going to trim off a bit of the bottom of this making the bottom of the Vise about two and a quarter inches wide and I have some really sharp radiuses to do rather than try and cut those on the bandsaw I used one of my overdrive bits to drill out that radius and I can take that over to the bandsaw and cut that and I'll show you that in a minute so drilling the holes on this pretty straightforward on the top side it's just a straight through hole and on the bottom side I drilled a couple of holes to elongate that slot so I can tighten the chain later in the build and that'll make sense here later in the build been a long time since I've done a voice over y'all [Applause] [Music] just trimming out those side pieces I set my vents up at three quarter of an inch depth on the bandsaw I'm just going to very carefully cut up to those holes that I made with the overdrive bit and once I have both sides done I can come in and cut that little bit of left over and I did that by hand and also I'm adding this little radius to the bottom of that two inch or two and a quarter inch strip that's coming down not necessary it's just kind of a looks thing you can tell me at the end of the video whether you think it was worth the effort or not now where the threaded rods go through I need to recess a little hole where those oblong bolts go in and to do that I'm just using a 1 8 bit in my trim router and they don't have to be super neat or clean because they get covered up by a cover plate just need to be big enough for those oblong bolts and on the bottom you can see that one bolt moves back and forth that's to give me a little bit of play when I put the chain on so I can tighten it up so to clean up the radiuses I've been finding that I do this more and more now I have this little when handheld sander it's the spindle sander I don't even go in the other room to use my big spindle sander anymore I just throw this thing in my bench device and use it it works great and it's really good for these smaller projects like this so I'm just getting into that corner getting those things cleaned up and I'm going to do a little bit of sanding and the cleanup operations now [Music] with those operations done I was ready to take the front and back part of the Vise apart so after pulling those apart I just removed the painters tape now I'd like to mention here I prefer the painters take method with the CA glue over double stick tape double stick tape tends to leave a residue behind and the painters tape just comes off a lot easier now on the back of the Vise I need to cut in a couple of recesses or dados that's gonna the part that mounts to the Vise is going to slide into and you could obviously set up a dado stack or do this on a router table but it's pretty quick to do it just like this just using the single blade and cutting little chunks away if you were doing more than this what I'm doing here I might go through the hassle of setting something else up the one problem with doing it this way is you've got to be very careful about you and you're fitting it so you know get close to it and then check it a bunch of times to make sure you've got a good fit [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] with the joinery roughed out on the table saw I came back and cut off The Ridges with a chisel now if I was using a flat top blade this wouldn't be an issue but because I kept a standard blade in there I had some little tiny ridges that I needed to Chisel out which makes pretty short work of things and the fit wasn't too bad [Music] to make this Vice more user friendly I took some material out of the top so I just moved my blade to a steep angle and then remove some of that material that's going to make it a little bit more accessible to get in when you're working on small parts and on the back side I cut a slot in that's going to create this rabbet where I can actually glue in some Jaws for the vise [Music] now this is another complaint about I've had about the hempwood and I'm trying to be I don't want to turn this whole video into a rant about hempwood but I've heard a lot of good things about it and actually using it none of those things seem to be true other than the fact that it's sustainable uh it was very difficult to Mill with a sharp router bit on it was still getting pull out and tears tear out on the corners which I had to go back later and fill before I could put a finish on and it was just one thing after another the other thing you need to be very careful about is the amount of glue you put on it because it swells really badly so when I was gluing the brace on the back I was very careful not to put too much glue into that joint or I would have ended up with a lot of swelling that I had to deal with [Music] thank you [Music] in hindsight if I had to do it again I probably would have covered all of the hemp wood with a filler and then sanded it out but in this case I just put it in the places that were really obvious and took it over to the sanding area and sanded everything up foreign we went up to 220 grit and after putting the raking light across it it was just full of pits and all kinds of things and at this point I was kind of over it so I'm just like now we're gonna do it this way now as far as the Finish goes I didn't want anything that was going to soak into it a lot crazy create any swelling so no oil finishes we decided just going to use some spray can lacquer we did a semi-gloss and that was probably our best bet this absorbed a lot of finish I think at the end of the day we ended up with um 10 coats maybe 11 coats of lacquer on this [Music] now I've said a lot of negative things about hemp Hood but in its defense when it was finished it really did look very gorgeous I was worried it was going to look like you know chipboard but it turned out amazing now the last couple things I need to do for this are just to make the cover plates and the Jaws for the vice and then start assembling it and again I'm over at the bandsaw ripping this down loving the setup that we're using with the Carter blades the bow fence and the new band saw is just phenomenal [Music] I couldn't get the sapeelius as thin as I wanted it on the planer so I had to add a little piece of plywood to it run it through the planer to thin it out and then I ran it over to the drill press and just used some hole saws to cut out some rounds now that makes them a little bit rough but they were pretty easy to clean up on the sander and then I needed to make the holes the same size as the threaded rods that are going through this so this cover plate goes over the top of the threaded rods and just covers that elongated nut that is holding everything together [Music] off camera I made the handle and the Jaws for this so now it's time to start the assembly the first thing I need to do is figure out how long the chain needs to be so I mounted the hardware in place draped the chain over it and marked its length so when you're cutting chain it's pretty straightforward and there's different size chains that you need to think about this was a the size 25 or T25 chain and the sprockets that match that so to make the work you have to kind of just grind off one of the rivet heads or file off one of the little rivet heads and then punch that rivet through and once that's through you have the length you need now there's a little chain link that goes in between there and it's pretty simple stuff it's not super complicated but I can tell you if you have giant meat paws like I do this T25 chain is pretty small and it was a little bit finicky to get it all to work but we got it to work in short order and we were able to start putting the whole thing together and it's permanently fixed positions [Music] the assembly is pretty straightforward the sprockets need to go in the center of that double thread so the thread's going both way and they have a transition point so we centered those out in that transition point and then the set screws were locked into place now getting the second one in was a little bit finicky and it actually took a couple of little tries to get it all right but once we got it started it was no problem at all now ideally what we want to do is match the distance between both the bottom and the top of the Vise at least to get things started and then we can go from there and adjust it the nice thing about these sprockets as is that you can access them when the Jaws are all nice and closed so you can move things around as needed that makes threading these things together a little bit easier foreign once I had everything kind of where I wanted it not not exactly perfect but close I was able to use the change to close the gap between the two face and back of the the Vise and then put the caps on now this is where I screwed up and I'll talk about this here in a little bit in the video I should have had these Jaws all the way closed when I installed the um the Caps over the the elongated nuts [Music] it's definitely mandatory to pre-drill before putting in the screws and then just a little bit of five minute epoxy to epoxy the handle on and we're ready to start getting the Jaws in place and testing this thing [Music] foreign thing to note on this Hardware is that the longer section or the longer amount of thread goes to the back on the top and out the front on the bottom now once we have everything aligned like we like it we'll go ahead and cut off that excess there's no no point in it being there I have no plans on taking this apart again even if I do that won't cause any big issues the nice thing about using those sprockets is you can actually adjust their position from outside of the Vise once you have it closed together with the Jaws on and I didn't film putting the Jaws on it's been a long process and working with the hemp has been fairly stressful now it's pretty close to done so I'm going to adjust the bottom out a little bit more so this kind of counts towards the top a little bit and then I'll cut this to length and readjust these now once that's done this Vise is ready to use another thing this if you decide to build one of these is the watch for when you're positioning these plates to make sure that you have this in the closed position so I position these plates when I had it in open position so these weren't perfectly lined up and I could have tilted them one way or the other if that makes any sense and I would have had a nice closed Gap here so I'm gonna have to pull those plates move the screw holes because I can't go back in the same screw holes which is going to mean they're going to be off kilter so I don't know if I'm gonna mess with that just to get a little bit of Gap filled because when I tighten this down the Gap ball fills up on it but that's one thing to be careful about if you decide to build something like this I use my high vices a lot for doing things like sharpening card scrapers it just makes it really easy puts it right here at chest level plus I'm getting old so I can see a little bit better about what's going on this is a great way for sharpening card scrapers you add the little accubird to your card scraping game everything changes and we'll do a video about this in the future now this is going to be a little bit stiff at first and it'll eventually wear out a little bit or work in a little bit and adding a little bit of paste wax to the threads wouldn't hurt at all and with the Dual threaded Hardware it opens up a lot faster and closes a lot faster than it would if you were using single thread everybody thank you so much for watching I really appreciate it I hope you learned something from this video and for those of you who are interested in trying to build one of these I'll put some links down in the description box below to the stuff that we use to make it this video is already long enough so we're not going to take a deep dive into the uses of a high Vise but maybe that's a video for a later date and I'm sure you'll see this in upcoming content thanks again for watching and until next time happy Woodworking and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: izzy swan

Views: 39,694

Keywords: How to, diy, table saw, tools, projects, woodworking, shop projects, jigs, band saw, Homemade bench vise, bench vise, how to make bench vise, diy vise, how to, making vise, homemade vise, making tools, wooden vise, diy from wood, workshop, woodworking tools, hand tools diy, hand tools project, homemade tools, diy tools, woodworking ideas, homemade projects, twin screw vise, chain vise, how to make, front vise diy, Bench Vise, Home Made vise, woodworking Vise, hemp wood

Id: GOQCNKI8h5Q

Length: 18min 5sec (1085 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023