Rebuilding with Straighter Lines

When I first started modeling the bench vise, my intent was to start with basic solids (squares, circles, some by hand) and then use the fillet edge on pretty much everything to get the final shape.  Good idea in theory.

I hadn't quite realized how sloppy I tended to get. It started out pretty good, but as I worked my way up from the base, things got...kind of wonky and misaligned.

Note to self: hide stuff more often! I think I was hitting the wrong point sometimes. 

Another note to self: recreating a curve based on the edge is the best route after an organic shape was made...not using the original curve. Sometimes patch or loft or sweep is just a liiiiitle off. Things blended better when I removed the original curves, and continued on from the edge curve.  Everything lined up better.

The biggest stumbling block I ran into was, by the top of the model, things were misaligned just enough that, even though everything joined nicely, it wouldn't create the fillets. At all.

See?  They look pretty good, but just slightly wobbly.  For one, I decided I needed a straight edge right around the clamp. I had build the mesh by starting with all the shapes around the edge first, creating curves from those edges, and lofting. It looks fine in the wires, but rendering left it kind of bumpy. And it wouldn't fillet at all.

I liked the shape, just wanted it to have a cleaner edge. So I wound up just make a planar surface out of square, putting it right next to the edge, and doing a split. Clean edge, shape maintained. That worked pretty well.

The other issue was I had made the squared off edge out of multiple cubes. While it looked fine when rendered, things became funky and difficult when I went to fillet. So instead, I made an outline from the outside edges, and rebuilt from there so there were no edges inside of the shape to mess up the fillet.

I wound up rebuilding a lot of the curves, and was much happier with the outcome. 

Not only does it look cleaner in the wire view, but it actually made the work when I started to use the fillet go much easier.

And another note to self...it seemed like sweep2 worked better than patch most of the time, even if the two rail curves weren't really mirror images.