Vise Advice

[lighthearted]

I own have a Rockler Vise that I have alignment issues with.

http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=21523&Max=999

I have remounted the vise several times, the hardware and mounting holes are lined up evenly with the edge of my bench, the bench is flat and the Vise portion is flat.

When I close the vise (even without wood in it) one end touches 1st as opposed to being parallel. This only gets worse if I put an piece of wood at one end.

What am I doing wrong?

[Onboard]

lighthearted, I couldn’t say for sure what the problem is but it may be a mounting issue. It could of course be an out of spec vise as well. If so, good thing to determine this early in case you need to return it. I would recommend reading the customer reviews, in that you may find a clue or something to jog your thinking. I see comment #8 has an interesting idea. Lots of good members in the WTO who understand these things far better than I do. Hopefully you’ll get some good feed back from one or more of those members.

I own have a Rockler Vise that I have alignment issues with.

http://www.rockler.com/product.cfm?page=21523&Max=999

I have remounted the vise several times, the hardware and mounting holes are lined up evenly with the edge of my bench, the bench is flat and the Vise portion is flat.

When I close the vise (even without wood in it) one end touches 1st as opposed to being parallel. This only gets worse if I put an piece of wood at one end.

What am I doing wrong?

[Lawrence Brown]

I'm assuming there's no substantial play in it, as in, if you continue to tighten it once it touches, it doesn't straighten out? If everything is tight, then it would probably be some kind of alignment problem. Either the vise isn't mounted perfectly square to the bench, or it may possibly be a bad casting. It could even possibly be uneven wood, but I'm guessing you checked that.

The simplest solution is may be to reshape the piece of wood attached to the vise head so it matches the face of the bench. Close it until it just touches like you said, then measure the gap at the other end and remove that much from the end that's touching. Actually, now that I think about it, that may take a bit of fussing to get an even surface all the way across, so first you could try loosening up the screws that hold the wood to the head and see if you can put shims in one end to correct the angle. If you get that to work and you're happy with the results, then you could take the time to custom fit the wood to it.

Otherwise, if you've made absolutely sure that there's nothing wrong with the vise itself (like making sure that the wood and the head casting is exactly 90 degrees to the lead screw and then that the support rods are also parallel to the screw, then it means the vise is mounted at an angle and you would have to turn it and remount. In that case, the new holes would be so close to the old ones that it wouldn't work, so you might have to slide the vise over and inch or two to drill the new holes or something.

Another question: when you mounted the vise, did you clamp it to the table so that the head (with the wood face already installed) was flat against the table side and then drill and mount? If you did, then theoretically every time you back the head out and move it back in, it should go to that same exact position. If it doesn't, then something shifted or something is loose or broken.

Nice looking bench by the way. At least the part we can see