Moxon Vise: Simple and Affordable
You need a vise. This one’s super affordable, and pretty simple to make, too!
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Here's the deal I really need --is, need the right word?--, I want some sort of vice. And the problem is, is a lot of vice hardware gets really expensive. So after seeing some of the designs that are floating around out there and doing some price checking on Home Depot's website and a few other retailers, I realized that I could put something together really inexpensively relatively speaking anyways, and that it wouldn't actually be that difficult of a project. So at the end of the day, without too much money into it I created this Moxon Vice. I'm gonna walk you through the way that I did it and great news. I have plans available for this one. Just go to www.windfirewoodwork.com/store to get the plans and everything else you'll need to make this build right along with me.
I had some old ash boards laying around that I had to modify the size of this project to be able to fit everything into those boards, but I cut them down to size and glued them together. I needed them to be a little bit thicker, well a little bit double the thickness that they were for this project. Probably easier if you start out with 8/4, but it's always good to know that you can make it work however you want. This was definitely one of those projects where you start to realize that you can never have enough clamps. I know that everyone's heard this so often, but here I am, I'm lining everything up, trying to get everything perfect and then I just start to layer on the clamps. I wanna make sure that these laminate as perfectly as possible and so I end up using goodness.
I, I'm gonna take a guess, probably 10 clamps on this board. and I move it off to the side cuz I have another one to do. But of course I'll spare you watching me do the exact same thing over again. But this is what everything looked like while I was waiting for it to dry. I came back the next day and removed all the clamps now that everything was perfectly laminated together. And then I used my jointer sled on one side of each board to clean off all the glue, squeeze out and get everything nice and square so that I could cut it down to its final dimension. First ripping it and then cross-cutting it using my cross-cutting sled. I decided to use the actual front vice face in order to center everything and make my marks for where I'll end up making all of my little notches for clamping as well as some holes in the future.
So here I am just marking where I'm going to be cutting out what all the waste on the back jaw that I'll cut out later. I put them back together and started just generally figuring out where I wanted the the rods to go through and all my handles to sit and everything. And so I marked those across the top and transferred my markings across to the faces of the boards. My plans do have some suggested measurements included in them and diagrams for exactly this thing, but I really do recommend that you use the project itself and your own eye to decide exactly what spacings you want. The the big thing is that you need it to be accurate because you're going to be cutting into this and we wanna make sure that everything lines up on both sides. I found it easiest to use some ca glue to keep my nut aligned while I marked it out.
And I really do recommend if you've got a marking knife that you use it to score all the way around the nut. a pen or a pencil work too, but a marking knife will definitely give you the greatest accuracy. The nice thing is you can take that nut right off just with a little side stroke from a hammer and it leaves almost nothing behind. I'm using a forstner bit that's just a little bit smaller than the outside of those marks that I made and I'm using it to drill down and remove the bulk of the waste here. Then I took a sharp chisel and I started to pare everything back to the lines that I had scored. This took quite a while and my chisel work definitely isn't up to snuff, but the nice thing is just trying to get that nut to be able to slide in securely and sit below the face of the vice so that nothing gets in the way.
I'm taking a 5/8 spade bit here and I'm using the mark that the forstner bit left to find my center point. And then once I get just a little bit through the backside of the board, I flip it over and use that point to get started to make everything fit and we'll knock in those nuts, make sure that they're flush and I do a test fit. I did find that there was a little bit of material in the way my hole wasn't perfectly centered, so I used a chisel to clean that out and tested that everything fit. And then it was time for the clamps. Again, I used my layout lines to make sure that the boards were perfectly aligned, clamped them in place, and then traced out the holes that I had drilled onto the face so that I know where I need to drill for my next set of holes.
I used some, some rough measurements just to really find what the center point was and I took a Brad point bit and just went a little bit off to each side because what I need to do is actually drill more like a slot in this front face. I don't have a drill press. I wish I had to drill press for this because it was a bit of a nightmare to drill this out. But at the end of the day, even with a hand drill, these don't need to be perfect because my knobs are gonna cover them up, which was a, a real blessing. And after I drilled everything out, I did use my chisel to clean everything up and make my two holes line up a lot nicer and make sure nothing would be in the way before I went to the band saw finally to clear out that waste and make myself some room for some clamps.
Next I grabbed my trim router and I started to round over all of my sharp edges. This is the wrong order for this. It really caused some issues when I was gluing my face material in place and the plans have been updated to make sure that everything reflects the order of operations I recommend. I had to get into my inside corners with a chisel to finish off my round overs cuz the router just really couldn't get in there, but it was kind of cathartic using my chisels this way and making sure that everything fit. I'm just gonna leave you to watch how everything came together as my initial assembly here
After my jointer video, some of you were bugging me about not having a hand plane and so I do have a really intriguing hand plane versus my previous method video in the works. But for right now I'm using the hand plane to just create an angled slope at the front of the vice to make room for using some hand tools. And I decided to use the suede side of this leather stripping. My wife just had laying around in her craft pile and use some weld bond to attach it to the interfaces of the vice. I thought it worked really well. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. Just had to make sure that everything was coated nicely, that it was smooth and flat and clean. And then I used a, just a, a spare piece of leftover material from another project that I had been working on to sandwich everything and get even pressure while I clamped everything to the bench and allowed it all to dry.
Initially, I tried to use a craft knife to clean up the leather that was overhanging everything. But what I ended up settling on was just a really sharp, cheap chisel and it cut away the leather like nothing. So if you're gonna do this, I really recommend that you get a good edge on a chisel and you just follow the edges of the board. You can cut the excess, you can clean out the holes with that same chisel without worrying about it because it's cheap. And eventually I also ended up cleaning glue out with another cheaper chisel and even just chamfered the edges on that leather stripping with the same chisel. Here I decided I didn't really wanna do a ton of sanding on this shop furniture. So instead I'm just taking a couple passes, light passes with the hand plane. I I've got it anyways, I might as well, right? And just cleaning anything off that I didn't want there, but before applying some Danish oil.
Okay, so I designed and 3D printed myself a set of these knobs for the vice. You can totally go ahead and make them out of wood. In fact, the plans are going to tell you how to make them out of wood. But the design files for this as well as just an stl if you think that your nut that you're gonna put in here is exactly the same size as mine, all available for you if you have a 3D printer. If you don't, that's totally fine. Like I said, plans will be in there for how you can make this out of a chunk of scrap wood. So let's get back to the build.
So there you go. I've made myself a Moxon vice. I think it looks pretty good. Functions pretty good. It tightens down, whew, really hard, but it also goes into place nice and secure. I'm, I'm really happy with it. Got some leather on the jaws. It looks pretty, I think it cost me very little. I think it overall, I, I might have 30 or 40 Canadian dollars into this project. And that's on the high end. And let me show you how I'm gonna put it away when I'm not using it. All I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up the jaw fairly wide and I've got this French cleat here that I put so high. I really haven't been able to do anything with it. So I'm just gonna drop the jaw down like that and tighten up on my French cleat.
Bam, I've got it stored away on the wall and it's out of the way. Looks great. Gonna get it back down. Just a quick thing. Boom. Got my Moxon vice. I hope that you find this project helpful. If you wanna make this on your own. The link to get sent the plans is down in the description. You wanna see more content like this. Make sure that you hit that thumbs up button that you subscribe. And while you're at it, why don't you check out one of these awesome videos over here. I think you'll really like them designs. I was, I do not know why I keep this in my pocket.