Crubber

Crubber is a composite material made by grinding natural cork and rubber, then combining the materials under great pressure to form a tough, resilient, grippy matrix that is then sliced into sheets. Crubber has become our favorite non-slip, super-grip material for lining vise jaws. All Benchcrafted vises are outfitted with Crubber.

Crubber is offered in two sizes:

5 x 9" (2 pieces per package) Good for leg vise jaws or for cutting up and use with smaller surfaces
5 x 32" Large enough for Moxon vises, twin screw vises or other larger items

Size:

5 x 9" (2 pieces)

5 x 9" (2 pieces) 5 x 32"

Variant

What's the advantage over suede or other cow skin-type material? It's mostly on the manufacturing end, which translates into less waste, and that means Crubber is a little less expensive than suede. It also means we're making less stuff that ends up in the landfill. We hate throwing stuff away as much as the next person. Plus, cork and rubber are both tree products, and obviously we like trees.

What about grippy-ness? Crubber is excellent. Every bit (and perhaps moreso) as grippy as suede. Since the ratio we use contains a fair amount of rubber, it's also very resilient and durable. Crubber-lined vise jaws will last for years under normal use.

Attaching Crubber

You can use any glue you'd like to attach Crubber to your vise. We've used liquid hide glue, yellow carpenter's glue and contact cement. Contact cement is nice in that it likes to peel or rub off cleanly when it's time to replace the Crubber. The other glues will have to be scraped or planed off, or removed with hot water, although they do provide a little more holding power than the cement. Bottom line, they all work fine. Make sure you use plenty of glue, especially at the edges.

Other Uses

Crubber can also be used to line the faces of your bench dogs for a non-marring surface, the faces of your clamp heads, the bottoms of shooting boards and bench hooks for a non-slip grip. We've even had customers who use Crubber as a strop. The material loads honing compound well, and has just enough drag and give to make a great strop. We also use loose pieces of Crubber to hold odd shaped pieces in our vise jaws. It also makes an excellent material to line drawer bottoms.