Hold Steady

If your workbench doesn’t have at least one vise mounted to it, you might as well be trying to work around the house with one tied behind your back. (And if you don’t have a workbench, you might as well be hopping around on one foot.) You need a bench vise and a wood vise, the difference being that the former mounts on top of the bench, and the later is mounted underneath the bench's work surface. First, get a bench vise.

Most bench vises mount with  three bolts drilled through a the bench top. The beauty of a bench vise is that it will hold tenaciously to almost anything in its checkered jars. The downside is that the jaws can scar what they hold if you clamp too tightly. If you’re clamping something soft, you can put  pieces of wood, known as a cawls, between vise and visee.  (I just made up the word visee but not the word cawl. My editor allows me to make up words, as long as I use plenty of real ones, too.)

Most bench vises have a flat anvil area behind the jaws that’s handy when you need to pound on something, and some have angled jaws (underneath the checkered ones) for holding pipes or rods. You want a vise that will swivel and lock at different angles to the front of the bench, usually accomplished by tightening a T-handle on the base. And here’s a cool feature on the new bench vise by Ridgid tools: a finger-release level underneath the handle allows you to slide the movable jaw in and out without turning the handle around and around and around. This is very handy when, for instance, you’ve finished holding something that’s 5-inches wide and now want to hold something that’s only 1-inch thick.