A bought a bench vise before coming up. I wanted a small one but they only had large. Now that I’d built myself a bench, it was time to mount it.
First step was to build myself a pair of jaws.
There is a house being built a couple of houses down for me, and I asked the builders if they had any useful scrap they were going to take to the dump. Among other things, they gave me some relatively-unwarped 2×6 pieces of lumber. I cut them to the right size on the table saw and marked up where the vise pieces would go through. Getting those holes drilled perfectly was the key to having the vise line up right.
I’ve befriended a couple of neighbours: one who’s an auto-mechanic and one who used to be a cabinet maker (and still has all his tools!!). Great guys to know. I borrowed the right sized bit from the cabinet maker, and took it and my marked up jaw-pieces over the the mechanic’s shop to use his drill press. I ever so carefully drilled my holes perfectly, and then excitedly brought them home to set everything up.
Looking good so far… Flip the table, measure twice, drill pilot holes, attach screws, careful, careful, everything at just the right angle and flip the table back and…
Goddammit! Turns out when I had built my table I’d accidentally angled the support beam at the edge of my table ever so slightly off of perfectly square! So now the outer jaw of the vise accentuates that and sits a couple of millimeters below the inner jaw.
Meh.
It holds work pieces, that’s good enough. Later I’ll plane the inner-jaw down so it’s all nice and flat too, which’ll be even more useful. For now, I’m going to count it as a partial success and a valuable learning project.