I was very fortunate to be the first recipient of the newly re-designed hand-wheels on Benchcrafted’s Tail Vise and Glide Vise. Wow. 
The craftsmanship is exactly what you would expect from Benchcrafted: beautifully designed, machined and finished; and they’re even beefier than the old wheels. In fact, the new wheels weigh almost twice as much as the previous ones. They feel great in your hands, and function beautifully. The added mass means that the Glide vise spins with incredible ease, and it adds to the feeling of control. Even the Tail Vise now has enough mass to spin open or closed for two or three turns. I’ve been working with the vises on a newly completed bench for a couple of weeks now. I’m thoroughly impressed.
One of my new benches
Great bench, and yes, those new Benchcrafted hand wheels look like they are very nice. So let me ask a question I asked you a couple of years ago when I attended one of your classes: is there any chance you’d be offering a class on making a bench? At the time I asked you, you said you didn’t have space to store a class’ worth of partially completed benches in your workshop. Now Chris Schwartz has really popularized the idea of bench making classes but I haven’t seen any such classes offered in the Chicago area.
Here was my thought on how to approach this: structure a class over let’s say 4 weekends, with students taking their partially completed bench sub units home on Sunday. Structure it so the glue up is the last thing done on Saturday afternoons and ready to work on Sunday morning.
Tentative agenda (but you could tune this up better than me, an admitted novice):
Weekend 1: Overview of design, road trip to buy the wood, rough cutting and initial milling. Order the vise hardware desired.
Weekend 2: milling and glueing up the leg end assemblies. Sunday, cut in the leg bolt assemblies. Take them home afterwards.
Weekend 3: milling the stretchers and benchtop boards. Glue up the benchtop Saturday afternoon. Flatten the top Sunday. Take it home Sunday.
Weekend 4: bring back in the left leg assembly. Install face vice hardware. Whatever else to finish up.
Your thoughts?
Marty,
I’m certainly thinking about a bench class more seriously now. I don’t really have the equipment to mill up all of the bench parts, and also think that might be better outsourced than done in class. I may have some additional shop space available. So it’s a possibility. I’m more comfortable with the idea now that I’ve just built three of these benches over the last year.
Anyone else interested?
Jeff
Yup, Very interested.