When I’m working in my shop, I’m sometimes confronted with a situation that requires three hands — namely, placing a couple of wooden blocks along the jaws of my vise to prevent marring the workpiece, while holding the workpiece and tightening the vise.
The drawing shows my solution to this problem. I simply glued magnetic strips (the kind that are stuck to refrigerators all across America) to a couple of wood blocks. When I need the blocks, I just snap them onto the vise jaws. When I don’t need them, they stay stuck to the side of the vise for safekeeping. No amount of cranking on the vise has diminished the magnetic power of the strips. And it would be just as easy to make a couple of leather or rubber vise liners for the jobs that called for it.
Ed Phelan, Union, NJ
