Making a decent vice better

petcnc

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Dec 29, 2012
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This is the fourth vice I have bought and I must say from the beginning that it was the best choice I made. The design was promising (Kurt style) the size was appropriate for my mini mill (80mm) and the price was right (52 GBP).

Arc4.jpg

It took a week to arrive from UK and as soon as I opened the box I tested it to see how it works.
It was hard to turn the handle and it was covered with a mixture of grease and oil. So I started taking it apart to check, clean and fine tune it.

First thing I checked was the parallelism of the body.

Body test.jpg

I was Happy to find out that sliding the DTI all around the body there was no movement of the needle.
I was impressed.
Since body was ok then fixing any problem to the rest of the parts is easy.
Testing the fixed jaw I found one side 0.05mm higher.
Using my dremel and a tiny sand paper tool I gently grinded the higher side.
Then I put sandpaper on the surface plate and with careful lapping I managed to make all sides parallel.

Lapping.jpg

Next I noticed the moving jaw nut had an uneven surface

Nut surface.jpg

and it was pressing the spherical segment sideways.

Segment off side.jpg

A few passes with the mill and the nut took its shape.

Nut ready.jpg

Next I cleaned the moving jaw and the spherical segment that was covered in rust.

Moving jaw.jpg

Spairical.jpg

I lubricated all parts adjusted the jaw plates and the vice works like a charm

On the mill.jpg

A nice vice at last!!
Thanks for reading

Petros
 
Last edited:
Nice! When I was improving a Chinese Kurt clone, one of the things I found was that the socket the spherical segment sat in was also pretty rough. I used a Dremel cutoff disk (I think #420) and lightly ran across the surface from several directions. The diameter of the disk was a decent match to the diameter of the socket. It smoothed out a lot of the casting irregularities. I noticed that your segment was looking a bit scarred. So you might well have a rough socket also.
 
Nice! When I was improving a Chinese Kurt clone, one of the things I found was that the socket the spherical segment sat in was also pretty rough. I used a Dremel cutoff disk (I think #420) and lightly ran across the surface from several directions. The diameter of the disk was a decent match to the diameter of the socket. It smoothed out a lot of the casting irregularities. I noticed that your segment was looking a bit scarred. So you might well have a rough socket also.

Hman I thought of that, but on test the sperical segment moved freely inside the socket so I let it be as it was. I might smooth it later and I plan to replace the primitive sperical segment with a ball from a bearing cut in half. Thanks for the dremel Idea!
Petros
 
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