Benchcrafted Moxon Vise Kit - Hanging It Up, with a French Cleat

Since my posting on building the Moxon vise using Benchcrafted's Moxon vise kit, I've had a number of questions about the table I put on mine, so I thought to roll a quick video.

If you've watched my project podcasts, you know that this vise has been center-stage for most everything ever since.  Best money I spent in a long time.  The thing is, this is intended to be a temporary vise you put up on a bench, do your work, and put away.

That said, I'll show you how I hang my vise to the side of my assembly table for quick easy storage and fast to take out.  You'll see how I had a  small storage box on the side there before the vise so even if you don't have this vise (com'on, everybody's got a vice... :) that storage box idea might be useful to you.

Benchcrafted Moxon Vise Kit - Cleaning Up Drawers

Tonight I decided to get back to those drawers I was making, oh, awhile ago :)

I never had a decent place to plane drawers; typically I'd clamp the drawer to the side of the MFT with a milk crate under it acting like a deadman 'platform'.  No wiggle since the MFT is anchored to the wall.  But it was slow to adjust the drawer and definitely not as stable on the side far from the MFT.

So... I made that little table on the back of the Moxon vise for my dovetail saw, chisels, and rubber chicken.  It is 24" wide by 11" deep measured from the front of the fixed jaw.  Turns out that I can easily straddle the table and clamp the drawer on the outside of the right acme screw. It's easy, very fast, and super stable.  This. Was. A. Winner.

Note that I scooted the vise over so the table portion was hanging off the side.  The piece of Maple you see sticking out the inside of the drawer is the piece that is normally clamped to the bench to hold it stable.  With the table being 11" to the back, I could take care of one side of the face, flip, repeat very easily.  Only the narrowest drawers for the top couldn't straddle as they are 8" wide.  For those, I clamped it in the jaw with the drawer out in front of the vise.  The 2" thick front jaw gave enough stability to clean them up, too, with care.

In these pictures, I'm showing planing the back.  Note how I have two pieces of scrap in the middle of the vise sticking down.  I did that to prevent the vise from moving back as I planed forward.  Thing is, I didn't need it; I removed them after the second drawer and it didn't budge at all.  If you look in this picture, I clamped the vise to the bench from underneath there.

What I also did later was take a piece of similar thickness scrap and set it in the vise above the far acme screw to set the parallel thickness (remember this needs to be done since we are on the outside of the rightmost screw).  I just left it there and could easily scoot in and out the drawers quickly and cinche them in place with a quick quarter turn.

This is the first time I enjoyed cleaning drawers.

Benchcrafted Moxon Vise Kit - Build, Mod, Demos

Benchcrafted recently released a Moxon vise kit (also available fully assembled).  I've wanted a "joinery bench" for a long time, but never found hardware I liked so I jumped at this kit when it was first made available.  Nice stuff!

In this podcast, I'll show you the kit, go through the rather easy build of it, and point out a couple changes I made to the vise chops as well as a jig for helping out with drawers.  Lastly, I'll show you how it works since it can be a bit different; for example, using the portion to the outside of the rods means you set the thickness differently than if you use the middle portion.  I've set mine to use the outside for faster and easier work with drawers so it affects me.  Getting to use the vise for a stack of drawers will be the test of whether using the middle or outside is faster.

Oh, I reference "Jameel" in the video.  Jameel Abraham owns Benchcrafted and produced a launch video for this vise that completely enticed me.

I was going to show using it with a bird's mouth like you would when cutting, say, abalone for inlay.  Mounting a bird's mouth is pretty easy in any vise, but the benefit of this benchtop vise is that it gets the bird's mouth to a much better working height.

As an addendum to this entry, Chris Wong of FlairWoodworks (and a great blog) asked me if I thought of putting a horizontal vee-groove in the jaws for clamping rods horizontally.  I had thought about it at one time, but forgot the day of the build.  So consider that; but don't use the bandsaw! ha ha, use a vee-groove router bit or molding plane.  The beauty of this vise is that you can retrofit that groove by removing the threaded rods and plowing the groove on the fixed jaw.  The suede-covered jaw would be too difficult to retrofit, but you'd likely only need the groove on one side.

I did get to use the vise often this past weekend while simultaneously working on 3 other projects.  Definitely glad I got it.

As another addendum to readers from Jameel's nice blog posting about this video, I've already added another blog entry about using this for planing drawers based on my table and the extra outside space.  Might be more by the time you read this :)  If you want to find those entries quickly, look in the label list to the right and click on 'Benchcrafted'.