Official Luthiers Forum!

You certainly produce some amazing instruments Simon and the small shop has never slowed you down, very cool.

I think you are asking me about the the vice's ability to handle a neck taper? If not sorry just be more clear maybe please? If you are asking about the neck taper I built mine for my home shop with no thought given to neck taper because the thing has some slop in it. The hole for the bench screw has to be oversized to accommodate the angles that it has to be at for thinner and thicker necks.

Dave builds his with a slight taper in the block that the door hinge is mounted to so to another OLFer who PMed me if you see this I told you the wrong thing. They are built with a tapered, add-in block where the hinge is. Does it matter, it doesn't seem to.

I didn't do this with mine and it works fine. The slop in all of them is enough to match any guitar neck taper which is minor. One jaw is fixed to the bench so it may flex a little but it's not moving. The other jaw does move but when the bench screw is tightened it's rock solid and does not move. That one operation, snugging the vice tightens the entire assembly up now including the instrument.

Wanted to add regarding the possibility for damage there are a few tweaks that we do, I'm getting PMs people are going to make these and this happened a few years ago too here when I showed pics.

One tweak is a rabbit in the inner top edge of the jaws with leather inlayed so it has a soft upper lip to prevent damage. The back side of the jaws are well rounded as you can see again eliminating corners and edges especially on something proud to the bench top.

Check out some of the wooden handles on ours at the city shop they started life twice as thick.

I was turned on to these vices just before I started producing the higher numbers of my guitars and good thing too they really made fret work and many other things much easier. I'm mentioning this because I ended up building with leg vices and it was not always all about repair work for me these vices work great with builders too.

And if you don't take it the wrong way Gibson used them Some of us have a love hate relationship with Gibson, can't live with em, can't live without em....

Let me know any details you need and I'l get you the info.

I do too and it's also pretty cool. So don't get me wrong it can do some things our's can't and our's can do some things this one can't.

Like you I just don't see the need when we use and have leg vices.

Regarding Simon's comment about limited space in his shop. We are on the third floor of a 120 year old house. None of our benches could use the Proper vice the benches are too tight to the wall it would have no room to spin.

The only place we could put one in the center of our main room it would dominate the entire shop and be a trip hazard. We simply don't have the space either.

Lots of considerations when you really peel back the layers.

Liked Dave and Hesh’s leg vise/bench setups so much that I made my own. The only bench top that is always clean! If you don’t have a leg vise and bench setup you should try it - it works really well. I tore up my back 50 years ago in the military and all my benches are 34” tall and I have rubber mats on the floor where I stand. Shop dogs can be a trip hazard though




Steve

_________________
Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Steve who's the pooch? Great vice!!!

You oughta like the vice since I copied yours Pups are Jake and Cody, my big buddies and usually in the shop except when I'm running machinery or spraying.



Steve

_________________
Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Woah this is absolutely brilliant! Bright guy indeed. What a great concept.

Thanks very much for the detailed pics of your leg vices Hesh. Also really like your nut files holder - looks really fast for swapping files.

So Hesh, does dave prefer K&K, Baggs or Fishman for his vice transducer?


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Actually, I feel no need to promote my level of professional status on the OLF, unlike yourself. I just want to talk about guitars.

And even more than talking about undergarments, we're all talking about our vices. My vice is alcohol, though I do have the bits to make a Hesh-style tail vise.

I'm still going to give the Proper vise a trial. But that's because I'm fifty-six years old and living in my mother's garage (with apologies to the Austin Lounge Lizards). I'm not a pro, and I have a little expendable income from my other endeavors. St some point, if the house renovation I'm up to my eyeballs in is finished, and the kids are no longer living in it, I might like to turn it into a small, local guitar shop. Towards that end, my wife has affectionately tagged the project "The G String."

You bet. I forgot about that since I never use his bench. Had a long talk with him yesterday and there are more issues here that I did not suggest that he suggested too. We are not trying to be unkind but when we are asked for an opinion we do due diligence.....

He said yesterday that it's a Fishman. You know he made a box that simulates the affects of swapping out caps and pots and tapers, etc and he posted a Youtube video of it.

It was a huge hit and the boxes we are told are being made in China, we opted out of royalties and such preferring to focus on what's on our plates now. He's a very bright guy, the brightest guy I have ever met and I am not exaggerating.

I'll add I've seen him notice a vet scanning roof tops and having a PTSD episode in downtown Ann Arbor. He befriends the vet, buys him lunch, helps him out with some money, etc. Later when the vet gets a dog Dave and I paid for the dog's vet bills. We have other homeless folks that we've helped too but I digress. Some received guitars from us.

So not only is he a very bright guy he's a very kind guy too. Anyway more concerns about the vice I'm going to list below.

Dan if you name a shop "The G String" they will come!

OK you've heard the expression "but wait, there's more."

Spoke with a couple working in the trade luthiers and that's important to me and to designate here because our use of these tools is different from a hobbyist. I could make the case more demanding in a number of ways we tend to push tools more since we work on many different types of instruments.

The way the guitar is secured in the holder they also think is a "mistake waiting to happen", not my phrase by the way and one comment mirrors my concern why no padding from the manufacturer?

This is huge. Several times a week I install pick-ups and the holder on the Proper vice covers up the butt wedge. There is no access to drill and ream the pup jack hole.... I'm sure for some price there is a different tail holder that maybe opens up the butt wedge area.

So this begged the question how do you secure an instrument with a tail piece? Yet another special attachment would be required. Bixbys are a non starter with this jig as well again without yet another optional attachment for specific types of instruments.

Then there was this comment about installing bindings. We of course reattach loose bindings it's a frequent, bread and butter Lutherie job. The comment is that a lot of force is exerted on the instrument pressing the "stretched" bindings back in place. If the tail holder was not secure enough looking at the design of the holder if the vice failed it would be a disaster for the instrument.

Leg vices leave the butt end exposed and a guitar clamped in a leg vice can be pushed from the side with a couple hundred pounds of force and it will not release. We often clamp the neck and wrestle the body off for neck resets on 70's Martins full of glue.

Moving to the head stock end comments were negative about elastic hold-downs and how problematic they can be and my earlier comment about work in the nut area being out in unsupported space being problematic was also reiterated.

When asked if they could have a free one of these would they want it. Both declined over space issues indicating it really needs to be on a stand in the center of a room.

And again we don't have a place in our shop where it would even fit. Retrofitting benches with "holder vices" of some kind since it works with various vices would mean installing metal vices on our benches and we won't do that it's a hazard to the instruments we work on most of the time.

So that's it from me on the Proper vice. Again not my intention to poo poo anyone's IP and we've been on the other end of the critiques with our products too and can relate. It's very hard to produce Lutherie products for a number of reasons. We Luthiers are also inclined to roll our own at every opportunity making the market for Lutherie products very small.

I can see uses for the Proper vice but not for how I work. It would have to be a special project where time was never a concern because of the set-up time.

Would this work to put a guitar in your face when you have bad back? It think that has to be considered by us as individuals and I would suggest doing a mental walk through of the operations that you intend to use it for. For example binding in this jig would be a problem because of how the tail is blocked off, etc.

Thanks

If you have them in your shop, they may as well be working. Here is Molly, building an 0 size guitar. I am not putting MY label in it

Here's my pal Sony RIP he used to do the Williams Jig routes

Molly never would wear her safety glasses.

Binding does one of two things - glue failure and/or shrinkage. Glue failure requires very little pressure to reinstall. Shrinkage, a bit of heat from a hobby heat gun (versus a full size gun) allows for easy fitting of binding in the waist area, where this kind of separation commonly occurs. Do hundreds of them. The installation of the binding, frankly, is rather trivial. It's minimizing any finish damage, especially when dealing with non-clear finishes where finish repair may be challenging.

Fuel on the fire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_noFejdxUc&t=2s

I'm not super knowledgable here so take this with a grain of salt but I did talk to Doug for an hour the other night on zoom sort of accidentally and just want to point out that I think his workstation is not to be considered his only means of working on guitars. I think he does a fair amount of repair work and fret work on it and uses it in a lot of different ways but he also showed me a sort of solera thing that goes into the vice that's on the same pipe as the workstation (well...all the total vice stuff). He walked around the shop showing me like a PLETHORA (really) of different jigs and vices and everything has that fitting on it.

So as far as things like working on a guitar with a Bigsby, I'm willing to bet that he has an attachment for the workstation but also probably has 3 other ways of working on it.

I have one on order and I hope that it works well. The workstation package is three things though, two of which are the vice which articulates in all directions and the fitting that holds the vice, so you can put the workstation to the side and switch to a solera or vice or whatever you want and have that rotate in any direction.

The other thing I'd like to get is the swivel leg....I can't attach things to the floor here but I have a sturdy bench and I could use that to get the vice away from the bench.

Again, the words of a not super experienced person....

I think Hesh was quite clear on why it didn't work for him. A professional repair guy has a whole different set of criteria to what is useful than us hobbyists do.