Broken Vise Repair Tested

do you guys remember this Prentice Bulldog vice I knew the first time I held its hand all we'd have a lot of great times together and then some idiot came along with the cheater bar and broke it it's been tortured and abused it's lived a hard life but it's not dead yet I think the Vice deserves to be resurrected so I have an idea to teach this old dog new tricks I'm gonna start by removing all the broken bits and repair all the cracks on the castings I'll be relocating the main nut by attaching a tail to the main vise body I'll upgrade the screw with bearings and try to keep the original meatball and handle try to keep it authentic looking as possible after the vise has been assembled we'll be re testing the vise for clamping force and then hopefully we'll have turned a great vise into a super vise the first step I want to do is remove the spindle out of here so I'm going to torch it and I'm gonna clean it and then at some point in time I'm gonna repair this crack in the top of the slide so I think I'm gonna start with that first [Music] you can see the the last repair in here which is kind of cool they put some screws on this side and then they stick weld it I can see where they blew through in a couple spots there stick weld actually worked [Music] here's what actually broke when we did the test a failure is the flag on the nut snapped off this is a dovetail and it slips inside the body of the Vice as you can see there and then at this dovetail to keep it from coming back as held in by this pin it's really that easy so now we got this all out we're ready to clean it up sandblast it degrease it and get ready to do some modifications to this I'm gonna find out what crack is with the torch because when I heat it up it's gonna want to expand somewhere right there so now I'm gonna put a center punch there and then I'll drill it definitely gray cast iron you can tell by the chips there are really small pieces if you interested to learn more between gray ductile iron I have a video on how to identify that [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'm happy the way the Bray's bonded to the cast-iron it looks funny and they never look like a perfect bead but it kind of fills in all the voids and you can tell that this tail has some scratches in it so that's kind of what they always look like but it's got a good bond I can see it I want to strengthen this whole tail of this slide and I'm gonna do that by putting a piece in here and filling this back in [Music] [Applause] [Music] got that piece of channel all blended in there and it looks weird because the casting has has all these weird imperfections so when you grind it smooth you know that's a low spot of a casting so when it fills in with bronze it bleeds over there but this should help strengthen and keep this from flexing the next thing I want to do is build the tail holder tail polar nut holder and all these things do they just sound just like a country line dance but that's the next project [Music] [Music] I'm gonna be braising this mild steel to this cast iron with this flux coated bronze this is an eighth inch diameter and when you're working with a large casting you need lots of heat so I'm gonna be using the cutting torch I was taught to use a cutting torch when I first started working at the steel mill with the old mill rights and I just kind of stuck with it ever since you can use a large welding tip or even a rosebud if you have a really big piece of cast iron that you need to heat it up when bonding mild steel the cast iron I found that it allows a flexible joint or coupling between the two so that's what I'm using a bronze in this application [Music] [Music] [Music] we have success we got the tail combined with the body with the braised on here I think it adds a cool little feature in detail I got a couple little low spots I need to come back in and fill back up but overall I think it looks pretty neat getting this Frankenstein look happening here but the next step I want to tackle is adding the the screw to the spindle or at least making this screw if you look at the original spindle from Prentiss they probably built it custom in the factory it's like some four and something rather threads per inch but I'm gonna make this readily off-the-shelf five threads per inch one Acme thread we could easily here build another whole spindle and make a meatball and a new handle but I really like this old one I think it has some style it has a story to tell so I'm gonna try to combine this meatball with this Acme and see if I can keep it strong what I'm trying to do here is I I want to have an interference fit between the meatball and the new Acme shaft so I'm gonna turn this shaft down by using the boring bar and I'm going to turn the boring bar reverse and cut around the outside and go in this was just too hard to kind of get chucked up in the lathe right you got two different diameters is just kind of awkward I think this is gonna be the most controlled and the most safest way possible instead of this shaft swinging all over the place in the lathe so we're just gonna turn this diameter down just a little bit and we'll make a mate on the Acme thread [Music] we got the meatball welded to the Acme thread here I'm ready to put some bearings on here to give this vice a really smooth action and hopefully increase the clamping force with less effort I want to use the same bearing that I used on the red vise and this is a ball bearing thrust bearing so its loads are designed to be sandwiched that pressure and I want to put it on the backside of this vise right here but in order for this really to work I need to make a pocket for the outer race to kind of sit in and what this is also gonna do is it's gonna prevent what I call the spindle rub so the original design was that it just slipped inside here like this and then when you were to torque not only are you putting pressure on the face but on the side of the hole so you're actually kind of rubbing on the side of the shaft and on the back face which just increases friction and overtime that whole hole get swallered out and enlarged so by putting this bearing in there with a pocket this is gonna keep the spindle concentric to the hole reducing friction so when you do that we'll take that to a milling machine and then on the back side because like I said up we want to be able to have some when we release the pressure it's smooth also we're gonna put this real thin thrust washers thrust bearings on the inside and that this is the nut that goes over the top and this is what pushes it backwards and that will go inside of this little pocket inside here so we need to take it to the milling machine first carve ourselves a hole and then we'll assemble it all [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] very the knt did an awesome job carving out that pocket in the front of this dynamic jaw for the bearing to sit in we've got a couple little chips out of the edge of it because that casting was so thin but it's still gonna do its purpose of keeping that bearing concentric with the bore of the of the slide so since we did away with that nut that was in the middle of the body we need to add the nut back into here again so I'm gonna extend the nut from the back of this tube to the middle where this one previously existed and then we're gonna add in some nuts and weld them to this extension so let's build this extension tube and all the parts to fit to the tail [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I need two pieces of plate one that fits on the inside of the tube one that's on the outside and they will be bolted together and then we will be able to weld this inch-and-a-half nut to one of the plates so let's get these cut and welded [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] got our nut extension all fabbed up and located and welded on the plate and as you can see we have the bracket in the back that this plate bolts to and then clearance in here for the tube to slide through since this is removable unlike the red fire ball vise I can experiment with different thread pitches and just make this piece and a new screw and keep the body and everything and do some experimenting with it this is the nut that when you retract the screw is what pulls on the back of the dynamic jaw and I want to make another one of these because there's three individual little washers here and they kind of like drop down into the the grooves of the Acme thread so I'm gonna make a new nut out of this piece of material and I'm gonna make a little pocket for these washers to sit in except for the very last washer I'm gonna leave it kind of proud so that it can make contact with the back of the jaw and that will keep these washers all together and inline and concentric with the shaft so let's make a new nut [Music] [Music] got our return nut finished have to 3/8 locking screws that'll lock it down to the shaft this is a lot beefier than an original so should see a lot of good life out of this and the purchase on the shaft is quite a bit bigger too to keep it from wanting to twist or rock and the screws are kind of not in line with each other that should help it too let's get the spindle and the sleeves and the bearings all installed and let's get this vise together [Music] man guys we got the Vice all together I heated up the vise to get the pores all opened up and I put some linseed oil in here to try to soak some oil in I really want to leave it just like it is I love the battle wounds the scars the wrinkles of its age this thing's probably 80 years old easily I want to leave the original patch job that someone did to repair the vise and then of course this little Frankenstein tail that we added on and bonded with the brazing new old rusty new oily look I just kind of like it just dig it tells a story I love how the bearing kind of retro fits right into the casting it almost looks like it belongs there having the tail dragger or the tail polar the the tube extension I don't know we got to come up with a better name for this style type of ice where we pull off the back but I want to show you something how smooth this vise opens up now with the bearings in the front and the back of this jaw watch this look how much just the vise handle swings back and forth I mean look how close my finger is to the meatball it is almost too smooth this will almost come back and hit you in the teeth if you're not careful so I'm thinking I'm ready to actually see what the clamping force is and if we can at least match to what it was originally with that flag style nut inside I'm curious let's go do it right now what was our previous test flashback tight as I can get it we peaked at 11,000 195 fifteen thousand nine hundred and eighty seven pounds there we go what are we up to five thousand nine thousand thirteen thousand fifteen thousand there are sixteen thousand just with the handle I know I could probably get another four thousand pounds out of it that's where the vise failed before here let's loosen it up this is how nice it is to loosen oh look at that one finger from 16,000 pounds huge improvement from before I think these vise mods turned out great we were able to strengthen the vise overall while increasing our normal everyday clamping pressure with less effort from the handle by adding those bearings a lot of you have requested to test the big twin screw shaper vise it's on 36-inch Cincinnati this is a 50,000 pound probe so we're not gonna take it anything past that if it does exceed want to exceed it but we're gonna use this big cheater bar and see what the pressure this big monster vise can produce well I'm hanging on that pretty good that's what close to 40,000 pounds man that's about all I can get you can try this one a little bit more that's a lot of clamping force it's not pushing really square now so there you have it 42,000 pounds you need the clamping force on this machine because the RAM will literally push her part right out of the vise so I'm glad to see that this vise can hold that much pressure well guys this was super fun to be able to Frankenstein this vise and repair it and get it back into working condition and have a kind of a cool little piece of history I'm gonna be giving this vise to my dad he's in need of a bench vise and he showed some interest of having this after I talked about repairing it so it'll be passed on to him I really like making these videos for you so please subscribe if you aren't subscribed already and I'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Fireball Tool

Views: 647,304

Rating: 4.9241214 out of 5

Keywords: fireball, tool, Fireball tool, Welding, prentiss vise, bench vise restoration, vise restoration, vise restoration video, broken vise restoration, bench vise, antique restoration, old vise repair, broken vise repair, cast brazing, cast iron brazing, vice repair, vice restoration, how to weld cast iron, vise fix, vice fix

Id: KX7ajWCxpcM

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 20 2019