Hi Guys
Work continues on the vises.
The Swivel Center started out as a slice of 12L14 steel. Chucked up faced and turned to proper diameter; the relief for the Swivel Bolts was also added and the center hole drilled and reamed.
This is a slip fit over the center pin which is pressed into the Swivel Base.
Flipped around, the top is faced to thickness and the detail added.
Set up on a fixture plate in the mill, the mounting holes are drilled and counter bored.
I didn’t take any in process pictures of the Swivel Bolts; here is a shot of the completed bolts. Notice the curves that match the circular channel in the Swivel Base assembly. The ends of the bolts were machined using the CNC. I had left them oversized from the lathe, mounted them in a collet and cut the profile.
Here are the assembled Swivel Bases.
Starting on the Body castings, the extra material left from the foundry was carefully removed in the band saw.
The Body casting was set on parallels and the cored Swivel Pin hole was dialed in. The Body was faced to .250” thick measured in the area between the rails. All the holes and key ways were done in one operation. The center hole which is undersized was milled to within a few thousandths and then reamed to size. In this picture all the hole locations have just been spot drilled
Here is the Body with the underside machine work completed except for deburring.
The Bodies came out pretty good, but after doing these Roland and I had some discussion about the best way to insure the bottom features are aligned with the rails and boss for the screw. Roland came up with a better order of operations to insure this, and has made these instructions available along with the plans.
It’s good to see the Body fitting the Swivel base so nicely.
Notice the little bump where the index line will be engraved, there is one on each side. These bumps were machined at the same time as the rest of features on the bottom of the Body and are machined to the same radius as the upper surface of the Swivel Base.
A simple fixture was designed and machined to hold the Body for the rest of the machine work. The fixture has keys that engage the key slots on the bottom of the Body. It holds the body square and parallel and includes a center hole for indicating. The cut outs on the sides are for work on the index lines and the little bumps where they reside.
The Body was mounted on the fixture and faced to thickness.
Standing the Body and fixture up on end, the hole for the screw was drilled. The surface for the Collar was also spot faced to clean up the cast surface.
By using the fixture I knew were my center line was and didn’t have to mess around with indicating a pin through the center pivot hole.
The Body and fixture were set back down and indicated using a gauge pain and coax indicator.
Some machining fun! The inside of the rails were machined, this used two different cutters, a 3/16” end mill was used for the full depth cuts then a 1/6” end mill was used to go back and nibble the area on each side of the screw boss until it just blended with the other surface.
Then a key seat cutter was used to machine the cuts under the rails where the nut will bear.
The machine work on the top of the body is mostly complete
The key way for the Stationary jaw was also machined in this set up.
Last operation on the base is to counter bore the screw hole for the thrust bearing. As luck would have it I had the proper counter bore in the drawer but I did send it out to be sharpened. It is nice to have a quality sharpening service nearby.
Well that is about it for now; thanks for checking in.
Dave