I finished the Roubo Bench in 2010 , and have been very pleased with it with one exception. The parallel Guide and Pin on the Leg Vise were a pain in the posterior to use!
BenchCrafted made my original hardware and have announced a solution to the inconvenience of the parallel Guide and Pin, in a soon to be released product called the Crisscross. The only problem is that to retrofit the new device requires a great deal of modification to the original bench making the retrofit..... impractical at best.
Along came the "Chain Leg Vise" from Jim Ritter at Ancora Yacht Services (chainlegvise@gmail.com). After some deliberation I decided to give it a try and the rest is happy history.
It required drilling one 5/8" hole through the Chop and Leg, installing two sprockets, cutting a small mortise on the Parallel Guide end, then installing the chain. The whole process took two hours and needed very few, small modifications the the Bench itself. The results are impressive. No more messing with the pin......Yeah! No sacrifice in holding power, and the vise (known for its smoothness) is as smooth as ever.
A maple shroud over the parallel guide/chain assembly finished off the job and made it more dust proof and maybe a little more aesthetic, but was totally unnecessary.
BenchCrafted made my original hardware and have announced a solution to the inconvenience of the parallel Guide and Pin, in a soon to be released product called the Crisscross. The only problem is that to retrofit the new device requires a great deal of modification to the original bench making the retrofit..... impractical at best.
Along came the "Chain Leg Vise" from Jim Ritter at Ancora Yacht Services (chainlegvise@gmail.com). After some deliberation I decided to give it a try and the rest is happy history.
It required drilling one 5/8" hole through the Chop and Leg, installing two sprockets, cutting a small mortise on the Parallel Guide end, then installing the chain. The whole process took two hours and needed very few, small modifications the the Bench itself. The results are impressive. No more messing with the pin......Yeah! No sacrifice in holding power, and the vise (known for its smoothness) is as smooth as ever.
A maple shroud over the parallel guide/chain assembly finished off the job and made it more dust proof and maybe a little more aesthetic, but was totally unnecessary.
