Lutherier's Workbench

Talk about musical instrument construction, setup and repair.

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Arnt
Blackwood
Posts: 134
Joined: Tue Oct 02, 2007 4:13 am
Location: Trondheim, Norway

Post by Arnt » Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:09 pm

Allen wrote: I use 2 pipe clamps that have some light weight ply as the jaws. These are lined with foam. The work bench can have either some threaded bases attached so the pipe from the clamp will thread on, or in my case, some longer pipe and I just drilled holes through the rail on one end of my bench. Very easy to use, and hold the guitar body better than anything else I've come across.
My guitar vise is just like Allen's. One nice thing about using the long pipe clamps is I can extend the vise out from the table if I want to, for even better access to the instrument. Plus I can still use the clamps for cabinet work when I need a couple of extra long clamps (I'm guessing the pipes are about 1,8 m or so). :)

About the general woodworking bench: Here is the one I use now, it is and oldie with all wood vises and so on. They are as common as dirt (or should I say snow) up here, every old geezer with a woodworking shop has one. Yes, I should really shine it up a bit... It is very sturdy and reasonably flat though, once I get around to tightening the moving parts up and planing the top I'm sure it will be even better.

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My previous one was another oldie that I made new vises for. It was larger than I needed, so it is now retired to the garage. Building a traditional drawer style tail vise is a lot of work, mine was inspired in part by the Shaker style vise in "The Workbench Book" by Scott Landis.
http://www.amazon.com/Workbench-Book-Cr ... 1561582700

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For some reason I built the vise out of ash. Traditional Norwegian benches are almost always made out of birch, which is by far the most common hardwood up here. I wish I'd used birch too, cutting those deep dovetails in ash sure gets old.

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As has been said, these benches aren't really that useful for most luthierie tasks, but they are wonderful for hand planing. In fact, their called "høvelbenk" in Norwegian, which means planing bench. The vises are also quite versatile for many cabinetworking operations, and they are great for holding jigs and fixtures. I wouldn't make one just for that, though...
Arnt Rian,
Norway

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