My Cheap Milling Vice Has Issues. Can I fix It? (Surface Scraping)
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
- G'day everyone,
In this video i want to try and fix the 4 inch milling vise. This is the machine vise that I bought last year for about $100. To no one's surprise, it has issues, some that I have known about since the beginning but ever since I got the surface plate I have been able to see just how bad the vise is. The bottom is not flat, and it has a tendency to rock on the mill table.
Because I do not have a surface grinder, and the mill won't be able to produce a flat enough surface over the length of the vise, I will be turning to an old method, known as surface or hand scraping. Surface scraping relies on using a scraper to remove material by hand. You use the surface plate to blue up the surface and remove the high spots until the surface is flat across.
This is my first time scraping so don't expect perfection right out of the box. I will also try to fix the jaw lift issue that affects the vise and finally I will give it a coat of paint and grind the fixed jaw.
I hope you enjoy the video.
Timestamps
0:00 - Intro
0:55 - The problems With the Vise
1:53 - Bluing the Vice
3:10 - Introduction into Surface Scraping
6:06 - Making A Carbide Hand Scraper
8:03 - Scraping The Bottom Surface
12:38 - Scraping The Top Surface Flat And Parallel
16:00 - Fixing The Jaw Lift
16:51 - Painting The Vise
19:21 - Grinding The Jaws Flat
19:56 - Testing The Vice
#machining #DIY #surfacescraping - Наука та технологія
The Gingery series of books on homemade machine tools uses hand scraping to a large extent, and even talks about using thick glass as a replacement surface plate. He really was a home gamer trying to get by with junk from the hardware store in an age before the Internet. I remember seeing his books all the way back in the late 70's, early 80's. There are a few forums dedicated to building his design of machine tools, using metal casting (aluminum), with wooden or lost foam patterns, and using the created lathe to build a metal shaper, mill, drill press, and then go back and make accessories for the lathe and mill. They also like to talk about hand scraping, alternative techniques, weaknesses in the design and how to improve them, even how to build using epoxy granite. A lot of the older trade manuals have wound up on the net as pdf files, and they really get the imagination going with what can be accomplished utilizing simple methods, clear thinking, and a bit of hard work.
I agree....I have a fine surface plate but not keen on putting that big heavy vice on it. I would think your mention of using plate glass instead would make good sense rather than risk damaging a surface plate.
I think the whole bootstrapping to make better parts on a machine youre using to make it better is very cool. Kinda like how guys made 3D printers out of wood.. which they then printed the wood parts out of a filament. Replaced the wood parts and then re-printed the same parts again now that the printer was more rigid and precise.
For the 'Engineers blue', I'd recommend _not_ using linseed oil. Linseed oil is a 'drying' oil, and a good choice when you want the oil to cure to a film - but that's explicitly want you _don't_ want for that for this purpose. Instead, you'd want it to never dry, otherwise it'd be a pain to clean the surface plate. Plus, linseed oil isn't usually the cheapest oil. Any cheap vegetable oil will work just as well; ideally you want one with a low iodine number (i.e. very far from a drying oil: so olive, rapeseed or canola, whichever happens to be cheapest. Sunflower is almost as good, if that's what you already have). Mineral oil aught to work too, but with starting from oil paint, some plant oil might blend better in that case, given that you're not expecting to need a long shelf life for it.
exactly this, try something different like engine oil or some other oil that isn't drying. Linseed oil turns into a rubber like consistency after some days to weeks, I ruined leather by applying linseed oil because of this. It will leave sticky residue on tools and might ruin your surface plate.
Btw. I made engineers blue by mixing a fine pigment powder with grease, don't make the pigment content too low or you might not be able to see the touching points very well.
I appreciate your sharing this info specially for newbies like myself. Thx. ae.
What does it matter if he washes it off afterwards?
@@frikkied2638 Linseed oil will spontaneously combust on a rag or paper. Thats why many don't like using it.
of course you want it to cure, how would you do layout otherwise?
I began scraping about forty years ago, buying a century old lathe that had been sitting out in the rain for decades. I found "a professional scraper" at a flea market, and spent about a year getting the bed straight and flat. I used four or five old files, each shaped for a different surface, going through the process very much like 'working this milling vise". I've exactly the same vise with exactly the same problems, and happened across this video because it needs the same process. It's always good to watch someone else do the work, and pick up details that may have escaped one, in their own journey towards precision. I've been doing this work fifty years, and learn some each and every day. Brazing carbide onto a steel shank is the best method I've found for making scrapers and you can grind the carbide to shape before brazing, to get in dovetails and other tight corners/spots. Working the scrapes into curves covers more area, and can help level the whole plane flatter, quicker. I used file made scrapers for the rough work, and the carbide tipped for the fine finishing work. I'd echo some other comments regarding the bluing and it's thinning. For finishing up, one needs thin bluing.
rumor has it he's still scraping that lathe.
Tip from a pro machinist - Don't worry about inspecting tooling in a manner in which it won't be used. Bolt it down to a mill table, then check flatness. At the end of the day, you could have a perfect vise and then have a bad setup, bad ways or just bad luck. If it's first off work, you could use the worst vise China produces and you'd still be fine.
That Vertical Machining Center video you have is awesome. I'm glad you showed us how it does the auto tool change. I like how the arm grabs the current and the new one simultaneously and how the new tool is rotated into position to be grabbed.. but not just rotated but also tilts into position. That final tilt action is very cool. I would love to see someone make that auto tool changer for their mini mill. Just the mechanics being used for the servo to tilt the tool into position would be cool. One motor to spend the tool into position where it engages a servo motor that now tilts it into final position for the arm to grab it would be a treat to see how someone figured out how to do it. Theres must be some kind of tab that gets pushed on the tool after its rotated into position to allow the servo to tilt it for it to be grabbed. I imagine there may be a little gear on each tool rest that when it spins that tool into place, the servo has a gear on it that gets pushed into the tool's gear via a linear actuator perhaps?
Brilliant stuff - great to see a someone learning from scratch, making the gear from scratch, and then scraping something real world. Very impressive. I've done some scraping too, using the old file method and also got great results. And I later bought the exact same paint scraping carbide blank - which I haven't had chance to use yet. It's good to know it's going to work well. Nice one Artisan - Thanks for sharing.
my favorite thing about your videos is- you dont always have the exact perfect tool for the job, but you find a way to get'r done anyway. very nice work. i feel like i need to inspect all my vises and probably do the same.
If it's not a surface for sliding parts (like the slides on a lathe or mill) you don't have to worry about the fineness of the blueing pattern. Just make it so that there are no big low spots left and you're good.
Oh, btw even surface grinders aren't perfect, depending on how you clamp a part it can warp and after grinding spring back, so the precision suffers. Scraping has the advantage that you check the flatness in a relaxed state of the workpiece, so it can be more accurate than grinding. I've seen people grind parts on the surface grinder before scraping them.
Interesting. All the videos and books I watched have are focused on scraping for flat machine ways so they all tended to focus on contact points per inch. Cheers
That has always been my understanding, the very best lathes are scraped into finished state, even CNC machine beds
@@artisanmakes at my workplace mounting surfaces for linear rails get scraped in and because of the fixed mounting of the rails the contact pattern does also not matter that much. Sure, you still want it to be pretty regular and even, but it doesn't have to be as fine.
This video was incredible, thank you for making it. So awesome to see these older techniques.
Of course Stefan makes it look easy. He's kind of a savant of machining.
That’s super cool, I’ve been terrified of scraping for ages, this makes it a lot more approachable. Thank you!!
Don't fear it. It is really easy to make work but like any skill it takes time time to master.
This is what UA-cam was made for! Really enjoyed this 👍👍👍😀
It's amazing to see what kinds of amazing work can be done with relatively cheap tools and the process by which you slowly improve your abilities without crazy investments. I feel like this channel is like This Old Tony or Inheritance Machining, but with tools that are in reach for most anyone. Great work!
You really do a great job correcting/fixing these low cost Chinese import tools. From your lathe to milling machine and now the vise. I have that same vise and it's been perfectly fine for the work I use it for. I also couldn't justify the high cost of the Kurt vise when I bought my milling machine. A person could buy that $100 Chinese vise, disassemble it and take it to a machine shop and have them grind it dead flat and still have 1/2 the cost of a Kurt vise. Keep up the good work!
Scraping is hard work but very satisfying when done right. Your hard work will reap rewards for years to come.
Thanks for sharing.
Great job, and great communication of your learning process. I used a disk grinder with Cubitron sandpaper to get all the rocking out of my vise. It went quickly and was surprisingly accurate. Once the rocking was gone, I flat-lapped it on a DIY surface plate using 80 grit Cubitron paper and finally 200 grit diamond powder. All that remains is a few small hollows that won't affect the overall flatness and parallelism.
how did you do a diy surface plate ? I'm no machinist but often I need a true flat plane to compare/sand flat other stuff like you did, but don't want to go for a pricey granit
@@escalator9734 The Whitworth three-plate method is tried and true and is what was used before modern gauges that can chase flatness to five or ten zeros. It can be done with either stone or metal.
Short version, you have three plates, A B and C. Rub A against B until they sit flush. Rub B against C until flush. Then rub C against A until flush. Repeat until flat. By rubbing every plate against every other plate in that manner, any cupping/dishing is averaged out and you get something approximately flat. By repeating as far as your sanity allows, you can chase the average to zero. In practice with cast iron, you might rub with prussian blue or blue dykum then scrape. You can use cheap steel blocks, but cast iron is more stable. For stone, you rub them together. Probably with water, but I'd look it up.
For hobby non-machining stuff, you can also use float glass and swap it out if it wears out of flat.
@@escalator9734 check with places that make kitchen counters you may be able to cut a granite offcut cheap or free
I used a half ball of a bearing for the contact point
It's very smooth and hard .
That improves the downforce
That is what I was thinking would be a better idea than that standard semi sphere the vise came with. Very high degree of roundness accuracy and surface finish with a half flattened ball bearing
Thank you for your hard work. Seeing your effort re-affirms my thought to have a surface grinder before doing scraping.
Good job ! Great results.
Great job,impressive result. I really enjoyed watching you learning a new skill, scraping. Tony
Great job. And, as always, a very satisfying watch. Thanks for the great content.
Well done is always. Bravo for coming up with a tool and a process that the rest of us can duplicate or at least emulate.
Really great work for your first scrape. Thanks.
What a fantastic effort - that came out GREAT! I had no idea hand scraping iron was even a thing, wow.
Great video, I love watching masters at work and also those starting from scratch or learning as they go. Brilliantly edited unlike my attempts. Enjoying the channel
Kudos sir. That's no small task. Well done
Excellent work.
8.40 So a very keen and finely polished edge on the scraper really does reduce the amount of force needed to really move some cast iron, I know just coz I've been using those old school carbon steel eclipse scrapers and while you get good results, you also get to practice your sharpening techniques XD. Happy making from South Africa
Well done 👍👍👍. Thank you for sharing. Be safe 🇨🇦
Watching these videos I always start to really appreciate the supply situation. Here in Germany we can buy everything we could possibly want from industrial suppliers for prices that arent higher than some chinesium garbage. Including carbide scrapers for 45 bucks btw.
Bitte was?
Wo?
@@FaskaRestoration Hoffmann. Mittlerweile sinds 53, hab gerade nachgeschaut, aber hey
@@Narwaro meinst du die Hoffmann group? Und wo kriegt du bitte hier in Deutschland einen vernünftigen Schraubstock, oder ähnliches für kaum mehr Geld als die chinesischen?
I know it's crazy isn't it? If we were in China these would be .50 cents. American made stuff is worse than Chinese now
Good job on the scraping, people used to serve an apprenticeship to learn that skill.
Good job. Definitively the vice now looks usable.
Quite good, for first try!
Actually, it might be more flat over the entire surface, than with surface grinder.
A good surface plate usually is better than the ways on a surface grinder.
Surface grinder makes very flat surfaces locally, scraping makes very flat surface over the entire part, with local imperfections, high/low spots.
Kitamura and Okuma still build their machines with hand-scraped surfaces for this reason - it's a slower and more expensive process than grinding, but can provide better geometric precision in the right hands.
I think this is another great episode Stefan!
Yes, it is a lot of work, but you will benefit from it for years to come.
I think this is an excellent result for a first scrape!
Thankyou
Great video and as you say, you got it good enough for your use. I'd caution about grinding carbide however. My brother was in that business for a while and why he's no longer doing it.
actually great results
I have a 3" version of this vice I use on my small Burke horizontal mill, it was a bargain at £39 delivered ! I will be checking it out now after watching your video !
Great subject, I have been happily using my economy clone for many years and it has not dawned on me to check its accuracy. I have done a considerable amount of babbitt scraping (round and flat bearing surfaces) over my career and you pretty much nailed it , learn by doing. Enjoyed the video, very nice work, cheers!
Nice pun with "Dawned"
I have one of these vices, affordable and effective for the hobby machinist. I don't know how flat the bottom of my vice is however I am not overly concerned about it either. I don't do any real precision work. Mostly I just piddle so, for me it's good enough.
Not any good at scraping?
Hey, if it works, it works.
You tuned up a cheap import vise and made it usable!
I'd call that a success! 😊
Good work. 1 caveat I would add is that the fixed jaw bolts will distort the shape some. Try a print with the bolts in to see if it needs some correction there. Also you mention the slight out of square the fixed jaw has but you would want it slightly out of square so it flexes to square under load, I thing yours was leaning in the correct direction so it's good. (when you need to be uber accurate you should edge find the jaw/part under full clamping load)
Great episode
Well done!
Great work 👍
Hi, Your work is as inspiring as Jordan and the rest of the good youtubers. Try scraping using the same dremel/ball grinding bit you showed in this video but be very light on touching the surface; this way saves you a lot of time and keep touching blue points very very precisely.. it worked with me. Saw it on youtube too.. just dont go deep and on just touching the surface gently. Good luck & thanks forever..
I have never done any scraping at all as well but it looks great to me thank you for the video.
Nice job, well done
So nice to see a video where it includes what went wrong
I had a pretty skilled Polish machinist working for me many years ago who was quite good at scraping. He always pulled the scraper towards him in short strokes. Seemed to give good results.
I really enjoy watching your videos amigo. Hello from VA, USA
Interesting video and something I had never even heard or thought of before. Well, I am also a woodworker, still, I grew up with my father being a machinist but that is something I would never have the patience for lol
I did the same thing to a couple of 4 inch milling vices a year ago. Spent about the same amount of time per vice. Tried to match them. And it worked pretty well. But when I needed a larger vice I bought a couple of Tegara vices from Shars. About half way price wise between the cheap vice and a Kurt, but every time I look at them I think about how nice they are without having to spend a week or so fixing them.
Great video, brought back some good memories.
Awesome. I was wondering if you could match vices using this method. Glad that it worked out for you.
I have the same vise and went through the same process. Scraping the top is harder because you're scraping for alignment, not just bearing. The paint is a nice touch.
I have a similar vice with the same anti lift mechanism, on mine I found the castings were contacting before the little ball, filed away the castings to create clearance and that sorted it.
I've not bothered going to the same extent as you to get it flat and parallel though, I think I'm going to take look at it later.
Very well done,, I have very often improved cheap tools. You can hack a lot of junk into somthing useful and it's always good to gain these skills along the way.
Stefan is Super Saiyan Level 4 machinist thats why he makes it look easy.
Very freaking impressive dude!
At 2:53, I said to myself, "Pop it on the surface grinder." I had a chuckle when immediately after I said that, you explained you didn't have access to one.
Nice job!
Great attempt, you're brave taking that amount of work. Love your videos. Do you think that lapping it on sandpaper afterwards might have improved the surface finish? My milling vise jaws run out by 0,35mm over a 125mm of travel. The rest of the vise is reasonable.
Great stuff!
Well done , another useful tip now that it’s all squared up is to setup a clamping bar x ways on table bolted down spyware to x an y turn vice upside down an machine the base on the end an one side so for a quick set up u can match the back of the vice to the edge of the table or the side using a engineer’s square from back of table to side of vice ,it only a quick way to get it set up for the jobs that are not critical an quick for the ones that are with a dial
This is great, and inspires me to have a go. Watch yourself with grinding carbide though, the dust is *super* bad. A vacuum cleaner nozzle next to the grinder is a good idea, and perhaps some PPE...
Cheers, I'm a bit weary of any grinding dust. I use a mask when using the regular aluminium oxide wheel, and from what I hear, carbide is worse than that. Cheers
Edit: The finest machines (and reflector telescope mirrors) are all hand scraped. Skilled hands still exceed out best machines for some purposes.
You've hit the skill level required for an Australian to make the most of those criminally cheap Ali*** Bang*** machine tool accessories; if you think of them as a kit of castings which are intended to be machined and finished by the buyer, resulting in a high quality machine tool or accessory, but without having to buy a house to remortgage in order to pay for it.
Herr Gottswinter did a similar thing with the Vertex rotary table, but with Stefan's special sauce of considering almost everything "probably good enough but I can make it exceptional".
I can't justify the cost of Kurt either. I can often justify the cost of Vertex, and their quality control is reliable and accurate. But when I can't afford Vertex, but I still want a nice tool I do what you did with this vice. It's a set of castings which have been roughed out, and with love and skill and effort, you can make it better than any of we AU hobby machinists could afford to buy outright.
Nice one.
Gday, big job but certainly well worth it, great job mate, cheers
Nicely done. I took a 80 hour hand and power scraping class with Richard King. I found the process is very time consuming but also very rewarding. Once you hone your skills, it is amazing the results you can achieve. Anyone interested in learning from the masters, I highly recommend King-way scraping.
Cheers, if I lived in America I'd definitely want to do Richard king's course, heard lots of positive stuff about it.
This is IMPRESSIVE 👍
excellent project...im fed up with trying to fix bad tools
Unfortunately buying some decent tools here in Australia is an expensive nightmare.
For machining I’d suggest getting some parallels so your workpiece is not resting directly on the base of the vice.
Definitely not the cheapest. I have parallels but it does make the jaw lift a little worse :)
Hello, thank you for your beautiful videos. What grit do you recommend for grinding wet stones?
Awesome! Every one of my tools is a cheaper Chinese one that I spent way too many hours scraping. But my little Chinese surface grinder, after about 100 hours scraping and aligning every surface, I can hold 0.0001” over a 4x6 surface
Awesome
Very cool!
Scraping is a great skill to have. It doesnt need a lot of prerequisites (money) to do precise work. Just practice.
I have a similar vice, the 6" version of this! Just watched the video after tramming my mill and spindle, and running a facing operation on both sides of the vice. I faced the bottom first, probing off to see the difference. This thing was a whole 0.0025" out of tram. I also drilled a couple of holes for another set of mounting bolts as the vice hangs off of the table quite a bit and wasn't sitting 100% flat. I'm just about to reassemble it, I'm hoping to also reduce the amount of lift that sliding part has. Now that the surface sits a lot flatter, (within 0.0003") I should be able to get good results especially when using softjaws with machined ledges. I may still scrape it when I get the chance!
If anyone has modified the sliding part to lessen the vice lift I would be all ears to know how you did it!
When making things parallel and flat on a mill with an unflat bed, bolt a metal plate to the bed and flycut that surface first. Then set your vice on that, since it is now parallel with the flycutter. It also lets you tram in your head since you're making a ton of long passes back and forth, you can make adjustments each time.
You do a great job in your workshop. You don't have to qualify everything you do (excuse yourself for not being skilled enough, for instance) just because of what people will say. There are times when it's very important to care about the opinion of others, but the UA-cam comments isn't one of them.
nice job.
Thank you.
I have a similar vise that has some parallellism issues as well. I'm not sure yet if I want to mill it or try scraping
Maybe the vise was bended by the clamping forces while not being supported completely at the bottom.
Don't know if that can happen, but would be interresting to check in a few months. To see if the vise is still parallel.
well done :)
Scraping has some better things than surface grinding such as enabling a layer of oil to be kept or to stop a vacuum forming under ground parts. That's also a part of the 'tick mark' scrapes.
Ca Lem has a great video on scraping and the ticks
Great job ! Very remorseful and stayed with in a budget, also the learning is priceless.
I would say, if your flood coolant is causing rust then you’ve got too much water in it. In my experience it should look like milk, not cloudy water. It certainly never rusts any of my machines.
Love the scraping by the way, looks good.
I've got it at about 10% concentration. The coolant doesn't really rust the machine but if it doesn't get wiped down after use I have found it causing corrosion after a few weeks.in one or two instances, in places that are hard to clean and spray with WD.
@@artisanmakes it could be a local climate thing, I’ve noticed on a lot of the engineering videos from down under, the raw steel stock always seems to have a thin surface rust coating on it. But I’d personally still add a little more oil, I always do & it doesn’t seem to do any harm.
Keep up the good work, I enjoy your videos 👍
Hey whats up. Good to see you fix the import vise. I am going to do the same thing when I buy one. I have scraped a lot in the past. I built the Gingery metal lathe which involves a lot of scraping which took me a little over a year. When you sharpen the scraper you have to have a radius which I think you did. If you see scratch marks on both sides left from the scraper you need a bigger radius. Only the middle of the scraper should be scraping. One thing I noticed was you were chasing each and every individual blue spot. Generally you are supposed to scrape them off in a group. I don't know if it is your scraper profile but it doesn't take much effort to make a scrape you can do it with one hand. There are definitely levels to scraping. Anyways good luck I have been enjoying your videos they are very entertaining.
Thankyou for your comment. I think the biggest issue I was having was rotating the scraper and that was catching the side of the blade as you noticed. I think I am getting better but I need more practice in it. Cheers
Your scraping also look effortless.
I taught myself scraping to make hand planes (woodworking type) flat on the bottom.
The main "secret" I learnt was - don't try to be too accurate, too early on.
While there are still "low" (unscraped) areas left, your high area (blue/scraped) doesn't need to be perfectly flat YET. You work to lower it quite aggressively. Only when the entire surface has scrape marks is it time to scrape with more care.
In effect you can think of it as a 2 stage process - improve the "shape" of the surface until it's flat; then work to improve the "texture" of the surface. It's a move from working on the macro shape to the micro shape.
In practise it's not a 2 stage process - it's gradual.
Put another way - imagine you have a little island 5 thou (0.005") higher than the surrounding plane. Your task is (of course) to lower the island down to the rest of the plane. And UNTIL the top of the island is within - say - 1 thou of the plane, it does really matter whether the top of the island is flat.
That would probably be a good explanation of why it took me so long to scrape the first time :)
If the fly cutting made it worse, perhaps you should try to tram the mill a bit better. If possible, of course.
In any case, I'm much inspired by your limited resources solutions.
I think the issue I'm dealing with is spindle nod. I need to get the indicator and check that. Cheers
I'm impressed that you just dove in and did it! Nicely done in the end. My assumption is that I will have all the same issues you did, the first time I try it!
I like watching other videos on scraping, as you do. One thing I noticed a little different in yours was that your strokes seemed narrower and longer, maybe even much longer. I would think there must have been something about that that seemed intuitively right to you as you worked. Seems like "those guys" kinda go "zip, zip, zip", and yours were more like "ziiiiiip, ziiiiiip, ..." :) Maybe it's the patience issue again; this is apparently not a rapid stock removal technique!
One other thing that seemed interesting is that somebody, somewhere pointed out that if the blue spot is surround by a dark ring, that's a buildup of bluing ink around the high spot, so the width and darkness of that ring can be a kind of indicator of how high the spot actually is, relatively speaking. A little bit of a 3-D reading.
Well done. Carry on!
The longer lines I think are are down to lack of prior experience. I need a bit more practice to get the stroke length down whilst keeping the speed up.
@@artisanmakes I guess the ultimate is those little Moore half-moons... yikes! I could only dream of having that kind of skill.
One day hopefully. A man can dream :)
The only things I know about machining I learned through videos like this, so pardon my ignorance here but doesn't running steel against that surface stone cause it to wear and become uneven over time? If so, how do you know when it's time to get a new one, or get it reground?
I've seen videos where someone has a surface plate they use for grinding pieces flat by using spray adhesive to glue a sheet of 600+ grit sandpaper to the plate and after scraping (or otherwise flattening) the part, they then wet-sand it smooth...if they really need/want a high-gloss finish, they repeat the process by gluing down higher and higher grip sandpaper (they usually stop at 1,000 or 1,500 Grit)...It takes a LOT longer, but it works just as well as a Surface Grinder (at least within the Tolerances they're willing to accept) while producing MUCH less dust and grit since ALL the sanding is wet sanding which traps the grit in the water as they're sanding...
For those screaming at their screen and tearing their hair out at the thought of using a precision surface plate for sanding, they have 2 plates, an old one that's still nice and flat they use for sanding and a new plate they use for precision layout work and they protect it like it's their first-born child...
😄😁😆😅😂🤣
Yeah that definitely gets stuff flat, getting the two surfaces flat and parallel is a much more complicated process which I don’t think can be done easily with this method
@@artisanmakes True...I was thinking however, you can use that process to get the bottom totally flat and then use the grinding stone in the mill to flatten and parallel the top. If you set up the vice on the bed perpendicular to your normal set up (so the entire base is on the bed) it should ensure that everything ends up parallel...
If you own (or can make) a 90 degree milling attachment, you can then turn the mill into something that looks like a true surface grinder (and set up a vacuum hose behind the wheel because now all the sparks/dust/grit will be flying in one direction every pass which reduces cleanup and risk of grit on the ways)...
i got 6 and 8 inch Indian-made cnc vises, nothing deburred, every edge razor sharp
I also bought a cheap milling vice recently. So far it looks decent but those corners are sharp!! It too cut my hand while I was inspecting it. yikes
Have you checked as you can purchase Kurt vice's from an Australian importer you might find it a bit cheaper freight cost?
do you believe it would be possible to build a laser fixture that targets just the blue areas? Like you blue up the part and set it up under the laser. Then the laser removes a layer from just the blue areas. I guess if one was going to do that, they would have the powers to build or at least the fund sto surface grind.
Years back I bought one for a drilling press vise. It was too big and heavy, so I put it aside. A few years back I bought a shop built 6" shaper ($50 Canadian) and pulled it out. The vise was crude, it had been poorly made on a shaper!!
ToT has a great video on making a scrapper
Good job 👍. One question. Can you not use an emery paper on surface plate instead of scraping?
Other question. How you make sure that the scraped surface is perpendicular to vice jaws?
You can use emery paper but requires a lot more effort to move the vice around vs removing what you actually need to with a scraper. Because the surface area gets progressively larger as you sand down the face closer to flatness, the pressure applied over the surface reduces which causes the emery paper to lose effectiveness.
Not to say it isn't possible, it's just actually faster to use a scraper.
Once you have established a reference surface, in this case, the bottom of the vice, everything else is based from this, the bottom infers parallelism to the top surface which can be measured with respect to the bottom surface as shown, once you have that flat you can then measure perpendicularity with a surface gauge tool using a known good perpendicular reference. The bottom surfaces of the fixed (and moving) jaws can then be scraped to adjust as required.
I've done a ridiculous amount of hand grinding the bed of my Chinese mini lathe because that utter piece of crapola is crooked in every imaginable dimension. To clean it up as much as I could without spending €1.000 or more on having the bed precision ground, I instead invested about €120-180 for a 100 cm long cast iron bridge thingy (can't remember the name, it's a flat reference beam used to print onto whatever you need to grind or scrape) which was flat to within about 10 micron. For printing the cast iron beam I used commercial prussian blue oil paint which I apply to the beam with a paint roller, which works perfectly and as if it was made for it. It takes a long time to dry out and can be transferred multiple times from the beam to the bed or whatever surface needs to be printed for reference.
Good man
Brilliant. I have the same vice, with the similar issues. I just need 30 to 40 hours to spare! 👍 🇬🇧
Thanks..if you ever go about improving your vice I would love to see it and the method that you end up using :)