Vice

Also called: vise, quick release vice, leg vice, tail vice

A vice is a clamping tool fixed to the top of a workbench, with two jaws that close on a piece of work and hold it still so both of a joiner's hands are free to saw, plane or chisel it. A screw running through the jaws does the clamping: turning it draws the jaws together onto the work, or opens them to let it go.

What a good vice needs

Audels (1923) sets out the requirements plainly: "The essential features of a vise are rigidity, weight, strength, and accurately fitting and smoothly working parts." Rigidity and weight matter because they are what makes the force put into the work at the vice actually count, rather than being lost to the vice itself flexing or shifting. Moxon (1677), writing in the seventeenth century, makes a related point about the vice's stand: its foot must be straight, so that it can take heavy blows on work held in its jaws, which he calls the chaps, without bowing or trembling. Landis (1987) adds a rule of thumb in the same spirit: the closer the work is clamped to the screw itself, the less stress is placed on every other part of the vice.

Jaws, cheeks and stops

The two jaws of a vice are traditionally called cheeks. Hasluck (1907) describes a bench vice, which he calls a top and tail vice, whose cheeks carry holes for bench stops, pegs of iron or wood against which, or between which, a piece of work is held for framing and similar jobs. He also describes how the moving, outer cheek is linked to the screw by a groove cut into it, so that turning the screw carries the cheek with it in both directions, opening the vice as well as closing it, rather than needing to be pushed open by hand.

Wider jaws and other designs

Not every vice holds work the same way. Landis (1987) contrasts the traditional leg vice, whose narrow jaw and need for a supporting beam to be reset each time limited what it could hold, with a later, wide-jawed vice that gave cabinetmakers roughly four times the jaw width and far more clamping options than before. More recent designs move further still: Bird (2004) describes a vice whose hardware, unlike a classic iron vice, stays clear of the work altogether, and whose jaw opens at a right angle to the main face vice, giving a second position for holding work; keeping its bench dogs, the pegs used to brace work against, clear of the path of an edge tool avoids striking metal by accident.

Keeping a vice's jaws exactly parallel as they close is not automatic. Goss (1888) notes that various mechanical devices had been tried to preserve this parallelism on their own, but that none of them were in common use.