Fixed a Chinesium Vice

[graham-xrf]

@graham-xrf, that style vise is a very good value. They are relatively inexpensive and work very well. Very low jaw lift. One thing you may need to watch out for is the bottom edge of the hole in the moveable jaw. On mine, that edge was very sharp (totally unfinished) and the burr would catch on the screw threads on occasion. I lost 3 screws in 6 months of use.
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The fix is to ease or radius the edge of the hole by lightly grinding the edge with a dremel stone. Just went through this recently.
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OK - so the very first thing out of the box is to relieve the sharp edge where it might contact the screw (at some angles), like in your previous picture with the yellow pen.

Know that I really value this posting, because this is stuff I don't know. Most of my experience has been with electronics/electrical stuff. I am shortly going to unpack the vise, and get the cosmoline (or whatever) stuff wiped off. It won't be the first time I took something to pieces before even I used it for the first time

 

[WobblyHand]

I didn't know about things like this either - had to learn the hard way! As you have often heard on HM, a lot of this tooling from low cost countries is missing the finishing touches. In my case, the sharp edge made contact with the screw threads under some infrequent conditions. If the sharp edge is radiused, the screw would skate over the edge rather than having the sharp edge engage the threads.

I had made the issue worse by putting in a slightly longer screw. I used a 40mm long screw rather than the shorter stock one. Was always having the screw fall out of the nut with the shorter screw. That can be a pain when you have trammed your vise and your fat fingers don't fit in the slot of the vise very well.

You will find this vise is of a very simple construction. It will be easy to ease the edge.

 

[Shotgun]

It won't be the first time I took something to pieces before even I used it for the first time

I've come to the determination that modern Chinesium is manufactured so that anything that is visible is finished, and, lately, to a high degree of accuracy. I have a strong suspicion that the companies there have people watching all the online reviews and revamp their process to address the negatives in the reviews. However, if something is not obvious to the naked eye, they will cut corners and cut them hard.

But, in many cases, it only takes a few minutes with a file or grinding stone to clean, smooth, and round off edges. Silly things like an edge that interferes with a screw, or a ball bearing that doesn't float because the socket it sits in was as cast. I got ER-32 collets that had 6 thou of TIR, that completely disappeared after I dug the cut shavings out of the slots.

I think setting the expectation that the tool will have to be torn down and finished before it is ever used is a good expectation to have.