Bench Vise Price Guide: What $59, $300, and $539 Actually Buy You

The morning the maple for my bench came home, the frozen ground had just begun to give, and I spent an hour doing nothing but holding boards down against the benchtop with one knee while I marked them. That hour is the honest case for vises. Everything a vise does, you can do worse with a knee, a holdfast, and patience. The question worth asking, when the catalogs start at fifty dollars and run past five hundred, is not which vise is best but what each squeeze actually buys you.

Three Vises, Three Positions

The taxonomy is simple enough to carry in your head. A front vise — sometimes called a face or shoulder vise — mounts on the long face of the bench and holds work between a fixed jaw and a moving chop. A tail vise sits at the bench end; the traditional kind uses a frame sliding in tongues and grooves, with a jaw carrying three or four dog holes spaced about five inches apart, lined up with dog holes in the bench apron. Wikipedia's entry notes it is the least expensive tail vise to build and by far the most complex to design, construct, and maintain — which is a fair warning in one sentence. A wagon vise is a variant of the tail vise: a movable block carrying one or more dog holes, riding in a large mortise cut into the bench. Fine Tools describes it the same way, a sled moved by a spindle, used to clamp work flat against the benchtop for planing.

So: one vise squeezes inward at the front, one travels along the end, one slides under the surface. Everything else is detail and dollars.

What Fifty-Nine Dollars Buys

Start at the bottom of the range. Yost's Model F9WW, a nine-inch cast-iron front vise with a solid steel main screw, lists at $58.99 on the company's own store page. Yost has been making vises since 1908 and states its products meet or exceed Federal Specification GGG-V-410A, the government standard for vises — a claim worth more than any marketing adjective, because it means the casting and the screw were held to a written spec, not just a price point.

I will not pretend a $59 vise is a $500 vise. The castings are heavier-machined on the expensive hardware, the handles feel different, and the finish is what it is. The snick of the quick release and the bite of the jaw do not know what you paid.

The Measured Middle

The middle tier is where the numbers get interesting, because Fine Woodworking actually measured something. In its May 2009 test of Lee Valley's Large Quick-Release Front Vise, testers recorded a 13-inch opening capacity and — the number I care most about — racking of 0.09 inches. Racking is the tendency of a vise's moving jaw to twist out of parallel under load, and it is the honest spec for comparing vises, because a racked jaw holds a board by its corners and lets it buzz under a plane. Testers rated ease of use good, noting the nut occasionally fails to disengage when you twist the screw, and named it best value. Product number 70G08.10, if you go looking.

Thirteen inches of capacity and nine-hundredths of an inch of racking, from a front vise. Hold that figure in mind when someone tells you the wagon vise is where the real work happens.

What the Wagon Vise Costs Before You Cut Wood

The wagon vise has real virtues, and Christopher Schwarz laid them out in Popular Woodworking when reviewing Veritas's Inset Vise in 2010: wagon vises don't have the sagging problems some tail vises have, and they give you more of your benchtop back for pounding.

But look at the money. The Veritas Inset Vise cost $89 at introduction, and it is the compact version of the idea: two dog positions, dogs a half inch tall, and a moving block that travels just 4 inches — requiring 40 turns of the toggle for that full travel. Schwarz called it a little slow compared to other end vises, and it must be removed to flatten the benchtop. Forty turns to close four inches is a lot of handle-spinning between operations.

The full-size version is the Benchcrafted wagon hardware. Fine Tools, the German dealer, lists the Benchcrafted Tail Vise (wagon vise) from €429.16 and the Classic Tail Vise from €407.07, German VAT included. That is hardware only — no bench built, no mortise cut, no dogs purchased. A traditional tail vise with dog holes five inches apart is cheaper in materials and enormously more complex to build and keep running.

The Leg Vise, and the Honest Case for Spending More

If you are going to spend $400 to $600, I think the leg vise is where the money turns into something you can feel. Benchcrafted's Glide leg vise uses a rolled-thread carbon steel double-lead Acme screw at 4 threads per inch, which moves the chop a half inch per handwheel revolution. Roll-threading hardens and polishes the thread; the nut is turned from a solid cold-rolled steel billet. It is made in the United States, and it ships with the Crisscross, an anti-racking mechanism that replaces the wooden parallel guide and completely supports the weight of the chop.

The number that justifies it, to me, is depth. Benchcrafted claims iron face vises give roughly 4 inches of workable depth from benchtop to screw and guide rods, while leg vises give roughly 9 — more than double — and hold the work right up against the screw, virtually eliminating racking. If you clamp wide stock, that difference is the difference between a board that hums and one that holds. That is what $539 buys: not more squeeze, but deeper, faster, straighter squeeze.

The Argument Nobody Settles

Here is where the internet consensus falls apart, and I want to be careful not to replace one dogma with another. Joel Moskowitz of Tools for Working Wood argued in late 2010 that most modern benches don't need a tail vise at all. The traditional tail vise's real value, in his account, is the unobstructed gap in front of the bench for clamping long parts and chair legs — something a wagon vise cannot do, since it supports work on the benchtop but does not let you extend the clamping length past the bench itself. He is openly hostile to end-mounted twin-screw vises, with their two threads that can bind, and recommends a Moxon vise for dovetailing instead. Yet even he admits he uses his tail vise a lot more than his face vise.

The commenters on that very post disagreed in both directions. One said he rarely uses his traditional tail vise and counts a leg vise as his favorite. The chairmaker Larry Williams said he is incredibly handicapped on benches without traditional tail vises. A chairmaker's bench and a cabinetmaker's bench are different animals, and it would be dishonest of me to pretend the question is settled. It is genuinely contested, by people who have sawdust in their hair.

What I Would Do With the Money

My own judgement, for what a hand-tool shop mostly does — edges, dovetails, smoothing, the shaving curl of a well-set plane — is that one good front vise plus a row of dog holes and a holdfast or two covers the great majority of the work. Fine Woodworking measured a 13-inch, 0.09-inch-racking front vise and called it best value; Yost sells a federal-spec one for $58.99. If you have more to spend, put it into one exceptional leg vise rather than spreading it across wagon hardware that costs €400 or more before a single mortise is chopped.

Buy the vise that holds your actual work, not the one that completes a diagram of what a bench should have. The wagon vise is a lovely thing. But it is the second vise I would buy, and for many of us it is a second vise we would never quite need.