New Changes To Benchcrafted Vises

We've recently made a couple changes to both our Tail Vise and Glide Leg Vise.

Both vises now ship unassembled, in more compact boxes. Assembly is quick and easy. It will take maybe one minute to assemble your vise. Leaving the handwheels off the screws has allowed us to package the vises more securely, using less packing material. We're also wrapping almost everything in VCI paper to prevent corrosion. Customers will have less waste to dispose of. Some customers, depending on what they order, may also save on shipping, since we can now use some flat rate containers for certain orders.

The other advantage of shipping the vises unassembled is that you can apply treatments, such as baked flax oil to the handwheels before assembly. Stay tuned for a blog post on this in a couple weeks. I'm treating the hand wheels on my personal bench with baked flax oil.

The other changes we've made are to the Tail Vise's sliding plate assembly. The sliding plate is now universal. We've reconfigured the holes to allow the plate to be flipped over for right or left-hand use. So any Tail Vise can be assembled each way in just a few seconds. This has the distinct advantage of making ordering a piece of cake. It also means we don't need to stock both vises, which greatly decreases lead times. Speaking of which, these changes are all based on our short term goal of eliminating our lead times entirely. We're getting close.

The other change we've made to the plate is with the dog clearance hole. It's now square instead of round. We moved to a round hole a while back in order to accommodate a wider range of configurations, but after some scientific analysis we've decided that the square hole has a much cleaner look, and removes less material from the plate. It will of course accommodate round dogs, up to 1" dia. if you wish.

Here's a short video we prepared to show the assembly of the handwheel and the Tail Vise's sliding plate. The Glide isn't included in the video, but it assembles the exact same way.

We've updated our installation instructions for both vises to reflect the new changes, and included assembly instructions as well. Those instructions are available separately on our downloads page.