Benchcrafted Crisscross Solo

Product Description

The Benchcrafted Crisscross completely transforms any leg vice into an effortless experience. Fully supporting the weight of the chop, the vice hardware, and its own weight, the Crisscross floats in and out on steel pins and bearing plates, giving a virtually weightless, friction-free action to the vice. The mechanism automatically adjusts through the range of your vice’s capacity to any workpiece thickness.

A popular mechanism for maintaining parallelism in vice jaws began to surface in the American patent record in the mid 19th century. There are also examples of this mechanism published in the La Forge Royale catalogue, Paris, late 19th to early 20th c.

This mechanism features two castings, equal in length and joined in the middle to create a pivot. The upper ends of the arms are fastened to the bench’s leg and the chop and are free to rotate on their mounts.The resulting mechanism completely eliminates the need for a traditional parallel-guide and pin arrangement.

Although the mechanism was never given a specific name, in modern times it has become known as the “St. Peter’s Cross”, a name taken from an early 20th c. publication describing it as such. During the development stages, Benchcrafted found several extant examples of the St. Peter’s Cross, and used them to prototype their version, the Benchcrafted Crisscross.

The Crisscross can be installed into new benches, or retro-fit to benches with existing, parallel-guide equipped leg vices. It can also be used to build accessory vises with any vice hardware, such as a full-size high leg vice for detail work.

Made from cast iron and powder coated matte black the Crisscross Solo attaches to the bench’s leg and chop with two 3/8″ steel mounting pins drilled through the sides of the leg and chop. These potentially deep holes (depending on how wide your leg and chop are) are most accurately drilled using a drill press, so choose this model if you’re building a new bench, and can work on the bench leg at the drill press.

You can of course install a Solo into an assembled bench, you’ll just have to figure out how to drill the long hole into the side of the bench leg.

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