Portable Workbench

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.

Great to see such skilled design and execution. So nice I would have to clean it after every use.

That is an impressive piece of work, and must make many wood-working operations so much easier.

I like the idea of the vice being able to hold tapered work like that. I've not seen that before.