It's always the question with those who make things. Pay someone to make a professional kit you can rely on, or find a way to make it yourself? This is how I decided to go "cheap and creative" on Moxon vise hardware. Here is my kit, sans wood for the chops:
kit light.jpg
Everything is from McMaster-Carr except the suede and the $4 white oak scrap with the giant check in it that I picked out the bin last year at my hardwood supplier in Martinez, CA. M-C price tag: $59.94 including tax and shipping. The 4" x 48" suede roll was $19.49 including tax and shipping. The kit is centered around the 3/4" - 6 Acme thread we all think is so cool about the Benchcrafted product. I tweaked my kit with 12" rods and leveling washers, and as you'll see I needed two extra nuts (not seen the photo because they're in situ).
I mentioned in an earlier thread that I wanted to try to make my own handwheels, since Benchcrafted has so cleverly taken that machining operation in-house, and it forms the basis of their cost (and price) structure. At $164, my total bill would come to about $197 for the above equipment, albeit with their thoroughly excellent cast iron handwheels.
To refresh, here is the design idea for my oak handwheels:
0 plan.jpg
The wheel is a sandwich of a 3/4" Acme nut captured between complementary mortises in an outside 5" wheel and an inside "shaft" as shown. My parts ended up being 7/8" thick, so the overall wheel thickness is 1-3/4".
It all seemed pretty sound on paper. Then I came up against my developing woodworking skills: specifically, mortising with a chisel. One key reason I wanted to go this route (besides wanting to save $120) was that my next big undertaking is going to be dovetails, and I know I'll need to wield a chisel well for those. Unfortunately, even after carefully marking the nut outline, here is how I cut the first mortise in one of the "shaft" parts:
1 skewed hexagon.jpg
Ouch. Turn the screen around a few ways and you'll see it's nowhere near symmetrical. It ended up this size and shape because I kept needing to take off a bit more here and there until the nut would fit. The next one wasn't much better. I knew I needed a different procedure.
Again I carefully marked off the profile, but this time I pencilled in the knife lines and added blue tape around the perimeter to keep me in bounds.
2 pre-tape.jpg 3 taped.jpg
Things then went a bit better, and I had the fit I wanted on at least two of the four parts:
4 going better.jpg 5 a nice fit.jpg
I'll need to chisel as neatly as this when I mortise into the stationary chop later! So my mistakes got covered up in the sandwich, and no one will ever see them. These ended up being my test mortices.
To avoid exceeding the photo limit, I'll finish in the next post.
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