Pony Jorgensen 4x10 In RapidWoodVise, Black

I got this vise when it went on sale for $132.25 with free shipping. I am very impressed with the vise. It is well built with all the correct grinding and painting. It works very slick with the half turn counter-clockwise to unlock and clockwise to tighten.The vise has a coating of paint that comes off very easily. If you have a oil and grease free work bench and want to keep it that way, I suggest that you protect your bench. I used the carboard box lid to set the vise on before installing it. I also wore latex gloves. I like getting dirty, but I hate cleaning off grease and paint from my bench and from the beautiful woods that I work with.After reading the reviews, I made sure that I added 1" diameter "O" rings to the handle to prevent the wooden caps from breaking. The instructions say to make sure that the handle ends are sanded before putting on the caps. I sanded one end and glued on a cap. I used the vise to clamp the cap on while the glue dried. After a couple of hours in the vise, I removed the handle and drilled a hole in the end of the other cap and handle. I used a #6 - 3/4" long round headed wood screw to fasten the cap on. If I need to remove the handle in the future, I can just unscrew the screw.The template for drilling the holes in the workbench looks like it has been photo-copied too many times. My template was off about an 1/8" of an inch. I didn't use the template to drill the four (4) mounting holes. With two (2) clamps and a 1" x 1" x 15" (approximate dimensions) piece of wood, I was able to clamp the vise to my bench securely and then drill the holes. This allowed me to visually adjust the position of the vise before drilling the holes. I used a center punch Empire Level 2720 Automatic Center Punch to make sure the holes were marked in the correct spot, before drilling.The shipping box arrived pretty well beat up. Fortunately, the vise did not mimic the condition of the box. It "took the shipping and kept on ticking"! (Sorry, I just couldn't pass that one up). The vise was in excellent condition, in spite of the shipping box.I used the vise today and found that it worked very well holding a piece of wood that I was using a wood chisel on. Nice and smooth with a tight hold.As I mentioned, I am very impressed with the vise. I am looking forward to using this vise until it passes to my will.

I ordered this vise for a new workbench I am building for my shop. The one recommendation I could find outside Amazon put this vise at the top of the list for this type of vise. I noticed some disparity in the reviews on Amazon but decided to order this vise anyway. I was not disappointed. The vise is clearly well-made and is very well aligned. Also, before the vise arrived I was completing the plans for the bench. I needed some measurements for the installation and could not find them anywhere. I contacted the manufacturer, and they immediately e-mailed me the dimensions I needed plus the installation instructions and the installation template. You don't get that kind of service from the Asian companies that now make most other vises of this type.One final note. Some of the folks who rated this vise poorly did so based on perceived issues with the shipping and packaging. My vise was appropriately packaged in a box that fit it well with cardboard inserted between the closed jaws to prevent them from damaging each other during transit. I'm sure I'd be upset if my vise was damaged when it arrived, but I wouldn't blame Amazon or the manufacturer. This thing is 36 pounds of heavy cast iron and steel. Short of wastefully packing it in a huge box surrounded by packing peanuts or nestled in big pieces of styrofoam, I can't imagine how you would somehow increase the odds that this product would safely survive the journey from Amazon to a customer's home. If the vise had somehow been damaged in transit, I'd be upset with the carrier who delivered it, not with Amazon and the manufacturer. It would take some pretty serious mishandling to damage this item.I highly recommend this product.

I may change my rating once I get the vise replaced (for free by Amazon thanks to their awesome return policy), but the first glance wasn't a good one. The vise (which is relatively heavy) arrived in a cardboard box (looks like original packaging from the manufacturer). This type of packaging just isn't designed for shipping via. UPS. The heavy vise had obviously been smashing around inside the packaging and at some point during the shipping process the package was dropped on something hard enough to break off one of the cast iron mounting tabs. I didn't even bother unpacking the vise to see what (if anything) else was broken, just sealed it back up and returned it. The quality of the vise looked good from what I could see, but I'm reserving judgement until I have one that I can actually mount on my bench and work with for a while.Update - Amazon came through with their awesome return policy and had a new vise to me within a few days. This thing is great! I like the quick release functionality. The only reason I'm giving it 4 starts rather than 5 is that the mounting options in the face of the vise are fixed right at 1 1/2", which comes right at the base of a piece of 2" lumber (which forms the top of my bench). Shimming to accommodate a smaller bench top was something that I anticipated, having to come up with a creative mount so that the screws don't come right through the bottom of the piece wasn't (why not pre-drill the holes a little closer to the top so that multiple width's of bench tops could be more easily accommodated?). Regardless, once I got it mounted it works great.