maandag 29 april 2013

Milling vise

A while ago I found this video by Luiz Ally:


In it, he shows a vise he designed and made with his Sherline milling machine. It's a very clever design and solves many of the problems faced when trying to clamp thin stock in a regular vise.

I decided to build one myself from a piece of brass I had lying around that was already roughly the right size. As anyone who's ever worked with brass knows, brass is 'slippery'. It has a low coefficient of friction. So it's not an ideal material to be used as a clamp. That's why I decided to add a pair of removable jaws to my version of the vise. This has the added advantage that since the jaws can be replaced, it's not a problem to machine them square to the table each time the vise is installed. The jaws can easily be replaced when they've become thin. Also specific types of jaws can be used to match the piece one wants to clamp.

I added a lot of extra holes spaced 25 mm apart because I wanted it to be compatible with the optical breadboards I sometimes use. Because my TAIG has three T-slots along the bed, another hole was added to the small side of the L-shaped part.

Below are some pictures of the result. A big thanks to Luiz for sharing his idea on YouTube. He has a lot of other interesting video's there so I highly recommend subscribing to his his channel.

The vise:


Close-up of the jaws:


I really like the combination of black and golden:


The vise installed on my TAIG:
.