It Worked for Me: Make a Vise from a Workmate

by Steve Kennel

Originally published in American Lutherie #142, 2021



Now, more than ever, I feel the need to get a grip.

The Workmate is a brilliant piece of design, but the heart of the beast is that big flat and conveniently not-necessarily parallel vise/work surface. I was using mine for holding woodcut printing blocks while carving, and found the Workmate itself to be too low and too wobbly. I robbed the vise mechanism from it, welded a piece of angle steel to the underside of each adjuster (Photo 1), and ran screws through those new brackets to mount the vise hardware on a plywood base that could be clamped to my workbench (Photo 2). This made the thing tall enough and sturdy enough to be useful for me. I also made new and shorter plywood jaws, as I wanted the thing to take up as little room as possible. The whole unit now fits under a workbench with a bunch of workshop flotsam when not in use.