English Field Gate—Part II

English Field Gate

Hand Candy

Customer David Keeling sent us a nice email and some photos of his Classic Leg Vise-equipped bench this morning. Gorgeous. We love crisp, clean work like this. Below is David's email:
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Subject: Thank you for the super hardware!

Thank you for the criss-cross and classic vise. Below is my European beech bench, shelf and dog hole yet to do, but the vise runs sweet and true.

The Crisscross mounting pin holes that you see are on one side only.  The chop is 8 and 1/2 inches wide which exceeded the length of the mounting pin so I made a choice of treating one side as a "show side" with no holes at all.  I made the leg 5 and 1/2 inches wide giving me 1 and 7/8 inches of wood on either side of the mortise for the Crisscross.  I drilled 1/4 inch shy of all the way through the leg then on the "working side" of the vise drilled a 3/4 inch hole centered on the pin hole 1/4 inch deep to allow me space to grab the pin for removal.  That left 1 and 5/8 inch of beech on each side to support the pin which I hope you concur will be enough.  I did mean to say holes for holdfast but I did make bench dogs out of 3/4 inch hickory dowels that I plan to use in concert with the holdfast and battens for work holding.

I think there will be more orders coming your way.  Three cabinet makers kindly let me use their air conditioned shop to build my bench.  They renamed your vise "hand candy" as everyone who came through their shop and tried it was amazed at how effortless the operation was.

Again in appreciation,

David Keeling

DymondWood is No More

In March we announced that we'd be replacing our Cocobolo knobs with DymondWood, an acrylic-infused and pressure-laminated plywood product that looks very much like Cocobolo, but has none of the drawbacks of rare rosewoods.

But it turns out that DymondWood is now rarer than Cocobolo. Sadly, the company that manufactured DymondWood completely burned to the ground a couple weeks ago. Rutland Plywood of Rutland Town, VT, was totally lost in a 5-alarm fire on August 21.

Right now we're not sure what we'll be replacing the DymondWood knobs with. With cocobolo now on the CITES list, we're not keen on replacing the knobs with anything in the Dalbergia family. And plain acrylics or plastics just don't cut the mustard for us. After true rosewood, and the excellent DymondWood, everything else seems like a downgrade. And to our knowledge, no one is making a DymondWood-like product.

Next week we'll be turning some samples in various woods (likely acrylic infused) to see what might fit. We'll be shipping Glide M leg vises and Tail Vises with what remaining DymondWood stock we have. We estimate we'll be out in about two months at best.