Once upon at least ten years ago, a rather large - and sadly broken - vice was stored under a bench. It only revealed itself when we moved out of the old big shed. Since Dad had
stolen scored all the benches with vices on, I grabbed at this, despite the sad lack of 1 jaw.
Mounted proudly on my bench, it proved to be almost entirely useless. So - I decided to fix it. I also decided to use aluminium for the jaws - this will probably be a mistake, but it's easier to work with than steel and I happen to have rather a lot of it...
First job was to remove the one remaining jaw. Many many years of use and abuse, plus clearly being stored in a puddle at some point, meant the screws were stuck fast. So I spent a very happy hour belting them with a great big impact driver
One screw sheared, the other - almost unbelievably, undid! Still, 1 out of 4 ain't going to cut the mustard, so the screw was binned.
Next, I mounted the fixed portion up on the mill and cleaned up the surfaces:
You can see the left-hand screw hole is clear & the right-hand one is blocked. Rather than try to re-use the clear hole, I decided to re-drill & tap both to M10:
The holes were exactly four and a bit inches apart...
The next job was to find a lump of aluminium. Here's my trusty Manchester Rapidor carving a piece off:
Half an hour later, the block was ready to be squared off, drilled and counterbored, then screwed onto the vice:
Then it had it's head cut off
Following a bit of tidying up:
Now the moving jaw was put on the mill (in the vice, ironically: A vice within a vice... is that too many vices?). As you can see, it was in a bad way:
After a good clean-up, new holes were drilled & tapped. I ignored the old holes as there was so much erosion at the top of the jaw, they didn't look like they'd be strong enough.
Anyhow, the other half of the ali block was now drilled, counterbored, and screwed on. After a bit of tidying up to make everything square, here's the vice in all it's new glory:
Finally, some machining work at my actual level of ability: Square blocks!
The jaws are quite fat, so I can re-skim the faces if they take damage. At least, that's my story, and I'm darned well sticking to it!
