Hemingway Milling Vice Kit Build

[steamer]

You could always drill it through from the other side.....

Dave

[sco]

Couple of reasons for drilling from the front side;

Plans show a blind hole.
Front is a nice flat reference face.
Easier to mark hole locations relative to the jaw insert step.

No big drama to make an arbor.

Question for Jo, is this casting envy or identifiable need?

Question for all, I've noticed my dovetail cutter gives a much finer finish than an endmill equal to maybe a fly cutter presumably due to the number of cutting tips on its bottom face.  I want to buy a similar non dovetail cutter to use like a fly cutter but they only seem to exist as expensive multi indexable tipped jobs that need a special arbor to hold them. They are also too big for my mill - do cutters like this not exist?

[Goldstar31]

There will be lots of answers- all of them right -and perhaps all of them wrong- for you.

At a certain point- in your world, your lovely sharp dovetail cutter will blunt and uncorrected - will lose its teeth. Your desired end mill or slot drill- or anything else that cuts metal will be Blunt and BROKEN!

Given that you buy a well made milling cutter - made of correct steel and correct- a lot of things-- and one of them is - hush now- the correct machine- will do things- then it will Blunt- and BREAK!

Sorry for the lecture- but if you look at the photos there are two sorts. One mob replaces tips - at a price whilst the other finds a way to sharpen or re-condition what they have. Choice is yours- whichever you go- you need a wallet spanner.

Time after time- the good writers will agree that the cutting edge of a tool will impart - an identical CUTTING EDGE shape to the work it touches. If you have a lathe tool and it is doing a finishing cut- it will be screwcutting a spiral. It may not be a proper even Threads per inch thing but it will be a screw thread.
To minimise what it looks like, you round off the cutting edge tip with perhaps a fine stone or the insert man will have done it for you- and charged you accordingly.

So back to that milling cutter- you have to look to see if the tips of the cutters are rounded. After all, a milling cutter is not a lot different to a lathe tool.

Does that make sense? I hope so

Norman

[Jo]

Question for Jo, is this casting envy or identifiable need?

Home and Machine Workshop were selling a similar little vice from New Zealand and I fell for it. Sadly when I had plucked up enough courage to pay the £180 they wanted for it some horrible clockmaker had turned up and purchased the last two . And they have not yet got any more in 

Jo

[sco]

Jo - that neatly side steps the question ;-)

[Jo]

Simon,

I can use my much taller 2" vice I have with a rotating base. But I have a thing about tools and I have certain items that I will not be parted with and that little vice was rapidly heading towards the can't live without  .

So sorry it is not the castings that I am envious of.

Jo

[sco]

Jo,

What attracted me was its low height - without the base it's less than two inches tall.  From your workshop pics I thought you had several machines with lots of headroom - but no matter.

Simon.

[Jo]

The BCA lacks head height. Yes she has a built in rotary table but... And I am planning on another smaller mill  which it will be ideal for  .

Jo

[Goldstar31]

What is probably desirable is not a vice with a rotatable base but something like a Clarkson Radius Attachment which will tilt and move items in an X and Y function-- and probably tell the time of the tides in HongKong Harbor(

Frankly, it is an interesting 'beast' and probably your Union grinder should have had one.

Moi, Oh, yes! I've got two. One on the Clarkson and one on the little Quorn.

Poisson D'Abril

Norm

[Jo]

I don't need a radius attachment my Alexandra Deckel SO cutter grinder does radi as standard 

But I do have one of these for my Union:



Which has two rotating axes and of course tilts:



She is nice but 3 1/2" wide and if I drop off the extension and use her as a vice with rotary base is 2 1/2" high.

Jo

[Goldstar31]

Very nice but there is a 4th Dimension. Jokes( well?) apart, I think that much can be achieved by using one grinder to refine the capabilities of the other.

My lunatic  'contribution' to all this is tacking on a baby top slide ex- an Enox or something equally ancient to one or other of bits of ironmongrels.

And I still don't know how to post pictures. No one is perfect- or so they tell me.

I'll Pacques in - Happy Easter

[ScroungerLee]

That is a very cool vice Jo! I want one!

Lee! (whose word of the day is an exclamation point!)

p.s.  "wallet spanner" - what a great phrase!

[Jo]

And I still don't know how to post pictures. No one is perfect- or so they tell me.

No problem Norman, John S offered to visit take some photo's and post them for you a couple of weeks back. When he is there he might even take the time to go through how to do it 

Jo

[Goldstar31]

Thanks but I'll get a mate to help -as and when my nursing duties permit.

[sco]

Bit more work done on the vice, central pivot and tee bolts, Hemmingway are a bit mean with the stock supplied for the pivot - plans call for 1" diameter and they supply 1" diameter bar so by the time it's cleaned up it's under size so I used a piece of stainless I had in the scrap box.  The plans show a one piece tee bolt but I cheated and used a button head screw and a kidney shaped washer;



I've milled the dovetails in the sliding jaw and the gib strip - you can see a small Lulu on the base of the sliding jaw where as I was roughing it out the end mill started to pull out of the collet and cut deeper than intended.  Plan to address either by filling with Araldite or adding a chamfer down both edges;



There's a fair bit more work to do on the sliding jaw yet but couldn't resist a trial assembly;



Simon.