Reply To: Picking a bench vise
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I have the 10″ Eclipse, and it’s been great. The built-in metal dog enables you to use dog holes on your bench to clamp much larger pieces, too.
Apart from that, you can build a leg vise for very, very little money. I built a copy of this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyRMtMJ-UHw using a 2×10 and some other commodity components. Maybe my entire investment was 15 dollars US? It’s done a great job for work-holding really tall components.
Take a look at both, maybe they’ll add a couple tweaks to your bench design (or maybe your current design already accommodate them), but between them and the dog holes on my bench, I haven’t wanted for any work-holding help.
Like you, I’m very new to all this, and I feel like good work-holding is perhaps more important to us as beginners than it might be to our more skilled brethren, both for safety and to allow us the flexibility and convenience we need to produce our best results.