Help! > Mistakes, muckups, and dangerous behaviour

Oh boy, a new 6" mill vise! .......not

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Jo:
Chris beat me to it: mount it on a sub plate to alter the position. If you do that think about potentially using it as a rotary base.

If you only want to mill a flat surface the angle of the vice does not matter, you can clamp it at any angle that fits on the bed ;)


Another bad habit you shouldn't do is to take the jaws off the vice to widen the gap  :-X

Jo

crueby:
I had the idea for the sub plate years ago since the slightly-larger vise I put on my sherline didn't have great slots on the side for the mounting brackets, and it was a pain to align it, so I did a one-time alignment to the sub plate by milling a shallow vise-sized recess in the plate, and putting t-nuts through the plate. Then I could use a square to align the sub plate to the table and tighten the t-nuts, very quick and easy to move the vise side to side or remove it from the table as needed without mucking with the vise brackets.

vtsteam:
Wow, thank you all. That was quite cheering to read through! I felt the vise was kind of a write-off before. I did briefly think of turning it lengthwise, myself, but the tabs didn't line up with the table slots when I tried it and I hadn't thought about alternative mounting methods.

So now to think about which of your suggestion (or suggestions) would work with this mill and this vise. I like all of them, btw!

I went back down to the far (bigger) shed where the mill is and tried swiveling it around. Here's a picture to give a better idea of what vise looks like on the mill:



As you can see the side pads extend beyond even the mill table. I guess I could do a mounting plate, Chris, and Jo, though it would have to be pretty big. It would take a lot of steel, and that's not cheap these days, and the weight of the vise and plate  might be more than I can handle alone. I do like the idea of the setup versatility you mentioned, though.

I also checked the back flange width, Jason, and I could probably gain a little over an inch in travel if I milled it off. That was tempting, moreso, because my older 4" vise had the annoying trait of just not quite opening to it's full 4". So the new vise at 5-1/4" if milled, would then be a clear improvement.

I checked closing and opening the vise with it mounted lengthwise on the table Marvin, and it was easy because of the universally jointed handle. If I held it nearly horizontal I could spin it fast, and then raise to vertical to tighten the last bit. I do really like your knurled spinner, though, very cool!

Thinking about it all, I think I'm going with the idea of clamping it down by the ends. I don't have to alter the vise in case I ever want to sell it (which might not be far off!) and I don't have to put more into it via a mounting plate. Clamps are the easiest solution, and I'll just have to see if it feels right to work with the vise mounted along the table.

Unfortunately it does take up nearly the whole mill table. I used to be able to leave the vise toward one end and clamp work down closer to the other end when I needed to, without disturbing the vise location. Now it pretty much takes over the mill.

But now I can see it will be usable at 6" with so thank you all for your generous suggestions, and we'll see how it goes!

Kim:
Bummer about the vice situation, Steve.   :-\

But glad you have some options now to make it useful for you!  You'll have to post a picture of what you end up doing.   :ThumbsUp:

Kim

crueby:
Nice big flanges on the ends should make it easy to clamp to the table at each corner. Great!

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