Lining Up Machinist Vise

[Bill Kirkley]

I have seen a number of videos on lining up the vise. Try as I might, I can never get it done as quickly as shown.

I found a trick that got it within half a thousands from end to end on the first try.

I clamped two same sized parallels and eyeballed them to the edge of the table.

 

[benmychree]

Most milling vises are provided with key slots on the bottom; you make closely fitting keys to fasten in the vise slots, and for ordinary work, there is no need to indicate the vise jaw in.

 

[B2]

Slick! Do you move your eyeball from one side to the other side to avoid any parallax issues or do you just align your eyeball with the center of the vise? I suppose you can do this twice. Once when bolting the vice down and a second time if needed when you adjust the vise rotation angle!

I measured the back edge of my table and found it was pretty good over the entire length ~22 inches. Then I made a really nice backer board out of 1 inch thick nylon and aligned it to the back edge for a rough pass and clamped it down at the ends. I drilled several holes and counter sunk them for T-slot bolts to camp the board with these so that the heads are only about 1/8 up from the table. So I have lots of material to waste before I would hit the T-slot bolts. However, I also drilled tight ~ 3/16" holes in a line along the T-slots of the table and inserted drill rods in these holes. Then before bolting the backer board down I pushed the drill rods through the backer board so that they were sticking into the T-slots and then push the board so that the the drill rods referenced off of the T-slot edges. I also drill like 500 holes in this board on regular intervals using my CNC program. The drill rods holes align the board to the table and the drilled holes, which are aligned to the drill rod holes and the table are then used to align my work. For thin materials I can also insert screws into the drilled holes after tapping and use the screw heads or heads with washers as clamps. I do not really need to have a 0.0005" alignment, but since the line is over almost all of the table it is pretty good..... better than my clamping and far better than my Mill's current backlash.

So as not to divert your posting to another discussion I will start another thread and post some more pictures there.

https://www.hobby-machinist.com/threads/milling-nylon-backer-board.95602/
( Milling Nylon Backer Board )