Member postings for Dr Al

This is a project that is more for woodwork than metalwork, but it involved a lot more metalwork than woodwork, so I thought it might be of interest to some people on this forum. Pictures of all the metalworking stages of the build (turning/milling/welding of lots of parts) are in the build log, link below.

It is a portable workbench, used for clamping wood higher up than I can with the vice built in to the main workbench. Apart from the 160 mm diameter aluminium hand-wheels and some basic hardware, everything was home-made. The quick-release vice mechanisms allow the vice jaws to be slid open easily once the hand-wheels have been turned about half-a-turn anticlockwise and then they re-engage the thread when turned clockwise.

The vice jaws are 380 mm wide and the moving jaws are coated in leather to improve the grip.

The bench is made out of beech and American black walnut; the mechanisms and other moving parts are steel and the bearings & bushes are brass.

The dual-screw vice allows vertical clamping of stock up to 200 mm wide and also clamping tapered stock. Both sets of jaws open to a maximum of about 300 mm.

There's also a little edge guide that fits into a 12 mm slot in the fixed jaw of the dual-screw vice. This allows two pieces (one vertical and one lying on the bench top) to be aligned with their edges in the same position, which is useful for marking out the pins when cutting dovetails.

The dovetail guide has a storage slot in the side of the bench with a brass clamp to hold it in place but make it very easy to remove (by turning the clamp 180° anticlockwise).

There is a bit more detail about the design (and some higher resolution photos) on my website: **LINK**

There is also a very detailed build log, consisting of 67 pages and more than 400 work-in-progress images on another page on the same site: **LINK**.

I've also recently added details of all the other woodworking tools and other projects I've done in the last year to my site: **LINK** and there's an existing section with more metalworking-related projects: **LINK**. This workbench involved a lot more metalwork than woodwork, but it lives in the woodworking section of my site as that is what it will be used for.

Thanks for reading; hope it is of interest.

Good job you use Windows and have no problems running arbitrary executable files that people email to you then...

Al

Thanks Michael

Neil (and others),

Like many others on this thread I tried and failed to get screwmez running. However, in my case I suspect that it is due my lack of a Windows PC and hence trying to get it to work through an emulator. I accept that this is part of the problem with not being a Windows user, but as it looked like such a good idea for a tool, I decided to go with an alternative solution: make my own cross-platform version.

I've written a first attempt at re-implementing screwmez in javascript so that it will run on any modern operating system with a reasonable web browser. The implementation is here:

**LINK**

A few caveats:

• It's had very little real-world testing (I'm hoping a few readers of MEW will try it out and let me know of problems...);
• I've never used screwmez (as described above) so I don't know for certain whether it does the same thing - I've based it on the screenshots in the magazine and the equations from my copy of Machinery's Handbook;
• I haven't found (or worked out) equations for minimum and maximum wire size - I've found equations specific to UNC and Whitworth threads, but nothing for BA or (more usefully) generic to a given thread angle;
• It was knocked together over the course of one evening, so there may be plenty of other mistakes - please be gently in your criticism!

I'd obviously welcome any comments, corrections, suggestions etc (although preferably through the comments form on my website as I'll probably see the comments somewhat quicker than if they're posted here). Also if anyone has any requests for other similar calculators, then please get in touch (preferably with the required equations as figuring them out is by far the hardest bit!).

Al