Set of 5 Raising Stakes

Earlier this year (2022) I redesigned my set of raising stakes with the goals of making them both easier to make and more secure when clamped in a vise. I wanted to get away from needing a big forge to bend the bars of steel. I also wanted to stop the smaller stakes esp. from sliding out of position if they weren’t cranked down really tight in the vise. This new design seems to have accomplished those goals, though it does now require a good welder. Still welders seem to be more easy to get access to than forges.

My main purpose in making these stakes is to be able to teach raising workshops on occasion. It’s quite challenging finding venues which are capable of handling up to 12 students raising at once. That requires a lot of stakes! I also find a lot of students like to be able to get the equipment needed to continue raising after the workshop is over. Hence, it’s really handy if I am able to sell them the stakes after class. I don’t see me getting into making stakes for general sale as a regular thing. However, when I’m doing a group for a class I can usually add in enough for a couple extra sets, and there are usually some left over after a workshop which I can refinish as needed then put up for sale. However, I felt like I needed a tutorial of sorts to try and explain how these mount into vises for anyone purchasing a set who didn’t take a class. I suspect there are also some of you out there willing and able to make your own who might find this info useful. So that is what this page is about. I hope it makes enough sense for everyone to get the gist of how these work.

Let me start with the basics. These stakes are made from 12 inch long bar steel in 5 different diameters with a 3″ x 3″ plate welded on that has a series of 1/4″ holes drilled into them. The diameters of the bar stock are 1.75″, 1.25″, 1″, .75″, and .625″. I’ve been using cold rolled steel because it was readily available. I do not harden the stakes as my understanding is that you don’t really want the hardened steel of the hammer head hitting hardened steel of the stake. Something has to give and if the steel of the stake is softer then it will safely give way, denting in a bit. This can be easily refinished to remove the dents if need be. Also, I don’t really like working on super high polished stakes. I find that to be too slippery. I generally go for a finish with a fine grit surface conditioning pad for a 4.5 inch grinder. That is what these stakes have.

With each stake comes a set of hardware consisting of 2 screws and nuts, with 3 different sized washers. I’ve been using 1/4-20 stainless steel screws 1/2″ long, trying to keep them short, but strong enough to hold up to the hammering. There are 4 of each of the 3 different sized washers. These are used as spacers of sorts which I hope I can explain more clearly later in this post.

These are designed to be mounted into a vise for holding. I’d strongly recommend the vise jaws be at least 5 inches. I actually prefer 6 inch jaws. What makes this complicated is that there are so many different types of vises out there, all with slightly different designs. I have no idea what vise you will have so I’ve tried to make this system of mounting versatile enough to adapt to what’s out there. So far I’ve been able to make them work on all the ones I’ve tried, but I can’t promise you there isn’t some style of vise that doesn’t work, or would require extra effort to adapt the stakes to.

In general, and strictly for raising purposes, I prefer a vise that has limited moving parts. Really I want ones where there are no pivoting parts. The jaws just go in and out. I have a couple old ones like this. Most vises though swivel on the horizontal axis and usually this is fine. On the vise I use the most this swivel portion did break under all the hammering but I found I could just pull off the bottom section and use a couple lag bolts through other holes to turn it into the simpler style vise.

There is another style vise that swivels on both the horizontal and vertical planes. This can be very useful for many sorts of things, however, raising is NOT one of them. Unless you are doing the light hammering work of planishing, or just not hammering too hard when raising I find these style vises almost always end up pivoting downward on the vertical plane under the repeated hammer blows which direct their force in that same direction. If you are getting a vise for raising I would avoid this style. Even the hefty vise you see in the photos below seems to slip eventually no matter how hard I crank down on it. While I’m thinking of it I should probably also mention that I suggest mounting a vise intended for raising work to a solid mass like a tree stump. This helps to take all the vibrations down to the ground making it more stable and quieter. If your vise is mounted to a table then the table ends up acting as a sounding board, amplifying the noise!

The next quirk with different vises that you need to watch out for is the space just below the jaws. It is in this space that the lower screw/s need to fit for them to act as a stop against the jaws. When I first designed these stakes I thought it was universal that this space was at least 1/2 inch. Then I found one of my vises that was a bit less than that. Then I discovered that many of the newer “cheap” vises are much less than that. For example, these days I suspect many people in the US would look to Harbor Freight Tools to get a new vise for raising. I know I would. Unfortunately all of these that I’ve seen so far are too narrow to work without some adaptation. (Mind you I haven’t yet gone to that store and measured the gap on all the styles of vises they carry.)

An easy fix I’ve found for vises where this gap is too narrow is to use some jaw inserts to widen it. I know there are rubber inserts available, but I don’t know if they would work for this application. I think they would be too squishy, but to be honest I haven’t tried them yet. What seems to work well enough are inserts made out of relatively thick aluminum angle stock as seen in the photo below.

So once you have a suitable vise it’s time to mount the stakes. Again because I don’t know what all the dimensions are for your particular vise, and because I don’t know just what angle you like your stake to be at while raising, I tried to make these adaptable. This is what the series of holes and various sized washers are for. Let’s dig into some of ways you could mount these.

The most stable secure way would be with the weld line of the stake resting against the top of the jaws and 2 screws underneath sitting right on the bottom of the jaws. If you can get this arrangement clamped down then that stake isn’t moving while you hammer. This isn’t to say that the whole stump mounted vise setup might not “walk” a bit over time. Hopefully the images below can clearly show you how this sort of mounting would look and be done.

Sometimes the dimensions of the jaws on your vise are such that you just can’t get a dual lower screw/washer configuration to work where the weld line rest on the top and the screws or washers rest immediately underneath. In that situation these can be mounted with a screw on top of the jaws toward the front of the stake and the second screw underneath toward the back of the stake. I’ve found this mounting approach is still plenty strong enough to hold the stakes secure. To be honest I find it an easier set up to do even if I can make the other way work. It also works if the 3 inch mounting plate happens to be too long and hits the bottom bar of the vise as I found happened with the blue Harbor Freight Tools vise you see in some of these photos. One final added benefit to this mounting approach is that you are also able to get the stake to sit at various other angles than just horizontal. I often like my stake to be angled a bit up. In some operations, such as planishing, I frequently like my stakes angled way up! This one screw above and one below approach allows for this. Hopefully the images and captions below can clearly illustrate how this works.

Next I’ll show a few images where I am still doing a configuration where one screw is above and one below, but this time I’m inserting some spacer washers in the lower screw/nut assembly. This results in the angle of the stake being slightly different since the lower jaws are now resting on the washers rather than the screw/nut.

Next I’ll show a configuration where I move the bottom screw/nut up to the 3rd hole instead of the 4th hole. When the mounted stake pivots on the top screw it will now hit the bottom screw much sooner since it is higher, resulting in a far steeper stake angle. In fact this angle is so steep that I needed to mount it toward the back of the jaws so that the back end of the stake could angle down below the jaws.

I’m hoping you are getting the idea at this point. If not this next series of images might illustrate how the washers work as spacers a bit better. Rather than actually mounting the illustration stake in a vise I have set one of my aluminum angle jaw inserts on the mounting plate as it would be resting against the screws/washers if it were the jaws of the vise.

In this final series of photos I’ll share some information about how I tend to use the various stakes in the set as well as the angles I often have them at. Naturally you may well find different uses for them. Part of what I love about this sort of metalsmithing is that such simple tools can be used to do many varied and complex things. I haven’t shown in any of the photos here yet, but I will sometimes also mount these so that they sit straight upright. There are situations where I find that the most useful angle for the job. Go ahead and play around with the screw positions to see if you can find other secure holding angles for your various jobs.

Hopefully all this has helped you to understand how my stake set works and mounts in a vise, whether you are looking to purchase a set from my ecommerce store (should any be available) or make something similar for yourself. I can create probably 95% or more of the vessels I do with this set. When I get to larger scale pieces I do tend to need larger and longer stakes. Because there are such a variety of vises out there it is possible you may need to get creative and use different sized screws or make custom washers to get them mounted exactly as you want. You might need to get thick jaw inserts if the gap on your vise is too small. I think though, that should you try this sort of mounting system you will find it holds the stakes more easily and securely than even traditional T-stakes. It also allows for the stake to be at various angles which standard T-stakes holders just don’t do.

One final tip, if you do a lot of raising it is probably worth the investment to get multiple vises so you don’t have to keep swapping out the stakes as you work. Personally I am regularly using 3. The 1 3/4 inch and 1 1/4 inch diameter stakes stay in their own vises as they get uses the most by far. Then I have one other vise I will swap out the smaller ones in as I need them. If I keep all the stump mounted vises close together then I can move from one stake to the next with a small swivel and/or roll of my chair as I work.

If I do have any stake sets available you can find and purchase them here. Happy hammering!