Home made Drill Press Vise

[RichardG]

I wanted a reasonable quality vise for my drill press. I had a cheap Amazon one that I threw away it was so bad. I have one of these:

 

Which is ok but not great. As well as having a small opening size, those enormous mounting slots are useless.

 

You can get really good machinists vises but they're expensive and I'm not milling big chunks of steel.

 

So I decided to make one. 

 

 

I used rods, bearings, and brackets designed for CNC machines on a 1/4" aluminium plate. The body is 9 and 12mm birch ply.

 

I wanted it to look nice because I'm planning on keeping it a long time, so I covered the ply in some old walnut sheet I had. The jaws are bolivian rosewood which is definitely a bit over the top but I had a couple of pieces left over from making a box at Christmas.

 

There are 5/16" holes drilled in the base so I can mount it on my XY table at an accurate 90 degree angle.

 

 

It's heavy and rigid, and I had fun making it. 😀

 

[Thistle17]

Richard sometimes it is just as much fun to make a tool or jig! Nice work!

Having said that what I find that frustrates me is a device to hold my work piece that gets captured in the vise. I am constantly kludging something up to hold the part as the vise jaw depth is too deep or I need to reorient the piece or some such thing. It never seems to go away.

Joe

Edited March 27, 2021 by Thistle17

[wefalck]

In metal-working so-called 'engineers parallels' are used to raise work in a vice. These are either solid, ground steel-prisms or sort of short lengths of wavy steel sheets. They always come in pairs, ground to exactly the same height. There is also a height-adjustable variant, kind of two connected wedges.

 

A cheap alternative are sections of drill-rod of different diameter and cut to the length of the vice. Drill-rod is ground to specific tolerances, so the diameter is constant, at least for our purposes. For narrow work-pieces use a single one, for wider work-pieces one in front of each vice-jaw.

 

Yet another alternative are 'keys' that are used to 'key' say a gear-wheel onto a shaft. They come in a wide variety of sizes and are ground to certain tolerances, as they have to fit into the key-ways of given tolerances. As a mass-product the are quite cheap and I have pairs of different sizes for my miniature vices.

 

As the jaws in the above vice are made interchangable, one can jaws of different height and perhaps different profile, say to clamp round work. Many engineers vices also have a rabbet cut into the edge of each jaw, so that thin, flat stock can be clamped without parallels.

Edited March 27, 2021 by wefalck

[RichardG]

3 hours ago, Thistle17 said:

Having said that what I find that frustrates me is a device to hold my work piece that gets captured in the vise. I am constantly kludging something up to hold the part as the vise jaw depth is too deep or I need to reorient the piece or some such thing. It never seems to go away.

 

I think I'm going buy/make some small clamps which can then be clamped back in the vice to hold smaller items. 

 

As Wefalck mention some different jaws may help. I looked at parallels in the past but was put-off by the price.

 

I'll probably make stuff as needed. Plenty of opportunity to make more jigs!

[Don Case]

Nice job!! Will we be able to hear you scream when you drill the first hole in it?😉

[RichardG]

5 minutes ago, Don Case said:

Nice job!!

Thanks Don.

 

11 minutes ago, Don Case said:

Will we be able to hear you scream when you drill the first hole in it?😉

 

I'll definitely curse!

 

Still it's nice to see a well used and worn tool.

 

[michael mott]

A nice looking vice Richard, I'm guessing the moving jaw is also a slide fit on the base.

 

Michael

[RichardG]

Thanks Michael. 

 

Actually there's about a 1/2 mm gap. I had debated with myself about having it slide on the base. However I wasn't sure if it might become a problem later if I had any expansion of the wood. 

[Roger Pellett]

Nice work, Richard!

 

The company that I retired from had a Laboratory that did mechanical testing of test specimens of hot bent pipe.  This was done to qualify the bending procedure to ensure that the process would not degrade the pipe’s mechanical properties.   For high strength pipeline steels a key concern was brittle fracture resistance at low temperature.

 

The test specimens for brittle fracture testing (Charpy Impact testing) are rectangular bars, milled and then precision ground with a surface grinder to a thickness of 1/4in.  The machine shop always made extra bars In case the test needed to be rerun so there was always a bucket of scrap bars in the lab.  These are excellent for raising stock in my vice.

 

Roger

[No Idea]

That is a beautiful piece of work thats practical too.  That would look nice just sat on a shelf as an piece of ornamental furniture.