Ampogrip Vise Rehab.

every once in a while you come across something you've never seen before and you can't really find very much information about if it seems useful you should probably buy it because you might never see one again this vice is really weird and really cool this is an ampo grip vice made by the very generic sounding american machinery co inc makes it hard to google i guess they didn't really care about seo back then this vice has nine independent jaws on either side and has these levers that are supposed to move and push the jaws back out into the middle they're pretty locked up right now the way this is supposed to work these jaws are supposed to squish back in and conform to whatever odd shaped object you're clamping in here there are a lot of really neat details on this it's actually got dovetail ways on it and it has these spring steel covers over the screws to keep dirt and grime out this has a lot of cast iron dust in it looks like it's probably used for machining castings there's a zerk fitting on the back here i'm not sure if it's supposed to get oil or grease we'll get into that a little bit but i'm going to start breaking this down and get it cleaned up i did actually find the patent for this online so i know that inside here it's filled with ball bearings looks kind of like little fish eggs kind of gross greasy crusty caviar must be steelhead i guess this grease is just rock solid these jaws are all kind of stuck together we can get them out the mechanism for pushing the jaws back and forth i was expecting some sort of eccentric but it's just a little notch in the thing that pushes the jaws forward and lots more grease a couple of snap rings and these slide out and then just a lot of disassembly then just get the rest of this broken down so after a lot of degreaser and scrubbing this is what we've got uh most of it's in pretty good shape just kind of rusty so can't do a vice restoration video on youtube without some of apple rust pretty sure it's in the user agreement somewhere so put that in get that cleaned up and of course the result everything looks pretty good and we'll just do a little time lapse getting this put back together lots of oil on everything i had considered painting this and i had actually gone as far as buying paint for it but after cleaning it up it's really not that bad so i think i'm just going to leave it i always feel like you can leave the patina and paint it later once you paint it you can't unpaint it going through this thing i decided that i'm going to oil the ball bearings rather than put grease in them because ultimately the oil or grease that's going to run out is going to run out the bottom and onto the ways and i'd rather have oil coming out than grease i don't really want that crusty grease in there again honestly one of the hardest parts of this was getting all these little ball bearings or they're not really ball bearings some of them are sort of misshapen but getting these things cleaned up and keeping track of all of them trying not to lose any but with a bunch of paint thinner and some wd-40 got them reasonably well cleaned up here and i hope just any remaining grease i can just kind of flush out with some of the oil it's just been nerve-racking working with these trying not to lose them i don't know if this is magnetic or they're magnetic i think this is magnet slightly magnetic which is actually working pretty well just get some oil in there boil them up real well keep them hopefully moving around well that'll do it for that side well it's all back together it's time to make the magic happen so to reset these jaws get them all evened up just pull these levers up oh oh no that one's binding up for some reason well my nightmare happened to figure out why this was binding up i took the top off when that happened this lifted up some balls got underneath it so i had to take it out it also got some underneath there so now i need to take them all out they're spilling all over try to clean them all up get everything out where get all the balls out get all these out clean it up put it back together and try again so as i was saying these levers reset the jaws and then i went and found the most irregular piece of metal i could which something that would probably be pretty hard to hold in a regular vise so let's see if the magic will happen here now i don't have a real vice handle for this i'm just using this so it's going to take me a little bit of fumbling probably have some parallels in there maybe i'm not quite sure how you put a parallel in this vice and there it is let's go put it on the mill and see what happens so as if this thing isn't quirky enough the fixed jaw is actually on the side with the screw on it but what that means is if i have this all the way back against the column on the mill i can't cut up all the way to the jaw so i think i'm going to swing it around mount it this way it gets me a couple inches at least which really isn't that much but if i really need to to use the entire capacity of it i guess i could mount it sideways get into some weird mounting hardware i can't really put a strap clamp on there because it would interfere with that so i'd be strapping it there clamping it down there but i think for right now i'm just going to go this way and if i need to i could cut that off a little bit shorten it up i also don't really know how you tram this thing or if you tram this thing i guess you don't really need to since you're working with something that's not square to the world anyway it's probably about as good as it's going to get so i got this chuck key it's one of those came in a box with some other stuff it's actually a little bit too big to fit the chucks on my lathe but i think this will be a good thing to put in here it's going to demonstrate what this vise does well and also sort of the limitations of it because this vice does exactly what it's supposed to do and does it well it holds irregular shaped parts but the problem is you don't really run up against something that you need it for that often if i had v jaws on a vice this would fit in there just fine i could probably press it apart hold it in a v block or a collet there are a lot of ways to work around doing irregular parts that are going to work just fine without this so i think the biggest drawback to this vice is it's not going to be that useful that often something like this a pretty weird shape but if you put it in a regular vise you're still going to get two points of contact here and one there it's going to clamp in just fine you can do whatever you need to it so i think this vice is probably just going to end up sitting on a shelf most of the time but when i do need it it's going to be [Applause] gold [Applause] so

Channel: Jeremy Makes Things

Views: 10,839

Rating: 4.8504672 out of 5

Keywords: Tool Restoration, machining, manual machining, metal working, milling, vise, vise restoration, machinist, machine shop, vintage machinery, metalworking, tool restoration, restoration, fractal vise, irregular vise

Id: aYUP4x0sL44

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021