I was lucky enough to acquire a couple of leg vices. I thought I would mount one on my particularly sturdy table…

The great thing about a leg vice is that it has a leg that goes all the way to the floor. All the loads and energy you impart when you hammer on a leg vice gets transmitted through this leg and straight into the floor. Conventional engineering vices are bolted to a worktop and the forces go through the workbench and then into the floor. This means you need a particularly sturdy workbench if you are going to be rough with your engineering vice. Plus leg vices tend to be wrought rather than cast, so they don’t break when you hit them quite hard.

I’ve got a particularly sturdy table and I’ve also used it to mount my leg vice.

It is a fairly trivial activity – you bolt the mounting plate to your workbench and drop the post into a little hole in the floor. However, I don’t have a hole in the floor and I want the whole affair to be kinda portable. So I made a portable hole.

This is a simple angle iron bracket that the leg of the vise can drop into. It is attached to the leg of my mighty sturdy table, the intention is that I’ll be able to put a bit of steel on the floor under the bottom of the vise leg to prevent damage to the floor, so this bracket isn’t taking all the force and ripping out of the table leg.

The table is sturdy enough to allow me to exert myself on the vice without fear of it breaking.

I’m getting quite satisfied with my blacksmithing setup, but I think I’ve still got a bit more work to do. The table for the forge needs replacing with something that ignites less often and I need to make the working area a bit more efficient. It’s getting there though.