Narayan's Vises

 

No, this is not going to be a post about high-end photography equipment, Chicago-style beef, or Bollywood movies on VHS. 

This post is about Narayan Nayar's Moxon bench. 

We get a lot of emails about how to mount our Moxon vise in a permanent bench. We don't recommend it. The Moxon is best utilized when you need it, and stored out of the way in the meantime. 

That is, unless you have room for a dedicated joinery bench. 

And we can't think of a better pairing of a permanently-mounted Moxon than what Narayan has done here: mounted it on a compact slab on a Noden Adjust-A-Bench. 

The Noden allows quick, easy, and rigid height adjustment for dialing in the perfect position for sawing dovetails.

That would be an easy thing to accomplish with a fixed-height bench. But what makes the Noden quite useful in this case is its ability to double as a bench for kids.

I have an old benchtop in my personal shop with a Noden base, and it is just perfect for growing kids.

Another advantage of the Noden base in this application is for dovetailing long boards. If you're building the Jefferson bookcases the 48" case width will mean the end of your board is too tall even for an auxiliary Moxon on your main bench--the board will be up past the jaws too far. You'll need to raise the Moxon up even more, and with a Noden this is easy. It's not every day you're dovetailing such long boards, but it does happen. You may need to rig up some scaffolding to get your body up higher too. I lay a couple 8/4 boards on the ground in front of the bench.

To read more about Narayan's joinery bench, click here.


We try to keep Moxon vises in stock at all times. Right now, they are in stock.