I got tired of using inferior quality vices, so I
bought myself a good one. This is a Wilton 600S. Has a 6 inch wide jaw, 5-1/2 inch throat depth,
opens to 10 inches, and it weighs more than I do. Needless to say, a vise like this deserves
a really solid mounting point in the shop. So this massive plate of steel — we've had
it in the shop for a long time — it's a 58 inch diameter piece of 3/4 inch plate. It's
not quite flat, but it weighs 565 pounds and I think that'll make a nice anchor for
the vise. And it'll make a nice table too. So big vices like this are commonly mounted
on a pedestal in the middle of the room, so that you can work all the way around them. And
I can see that as a big advantage, however in my opinion that pedestal either has to be concreted
into the floor, which isn't an option in my case, or it needs to have a really big heavy base
on it in order to be stable enough. And a big heavy base is gonna be terribly in the way —
I'm gonna constantly be kicking it. So that's why I like the idea of mounting it to a table,
because as long as the table weighs quite a bit, it has such a large stance with the legs
five feet apart or so that is really stable. Of course mounting a vise on a round
table isn't going to work very well, because I'll constantly be running into the
table here and here. There's no such thing as mounting it on the corner. So what I'm going
to do is move the vise out and mount it on a frame extension that holds it about here,
and that way I'm able to leverage the mass and the stability of this table, while still
being able to work on three sides of the vise. Okay let's get started on the build. The first
step is going to be to make an octagonal frame that will go under the table. This will
be made out of 2x4 inch square tube, standing on edge, and then onto the bottom of that I'll weld on four legs. Those will
be made out of 4 inch square tube. So to make an octagon we need a 22-1/2 degree
angle, and luckily the bandsaw comes with a handy scale we can use for that. Yeah I
think it'd be better if I use a precision protractor maybe. If you're in the market for
a bandsaw, try to find one with a swivel head, that way you don't have to turn the
entire machine like this for angle cuts. For every section of the octagon,
I can slide it forward I think it's 19-7/8 inch and flip it over to reverse
the angle. By the way this is 3/16 wall tube if you were curious. The octagon
measures 48 inches to the outside. So this bandsaw is really good
at making super crooked cuts, so I'm gonna have to grind that back out,
and for that I'll use my belt grinder. I have my adjustable table set to 22-1/2 degrees, and after I get it exactly 22-1/2
in that direction I can switch to my 90-degree table and then hold the
tube upright to get it square that way. And now that those all fit nicely, I can use the belt grinder again to chamfer
the edges to get ready to weld this together. So I've been trying for a while to get this
octagon squared up using a tape measure and a square and this protractor, and I have not been
able to get it even close. So per my design, this octagon was going to have an X through
the middle of it, so I think I'm going to go ahead and make the X now, and that way I'll
be able to reference the octagon off of that, and that should make it quite a bit easier. Also
this plate, as I mentioned earlier, is not flat. So welding this up on the plate wouldn't have
been that great anyway. If I make the X first, I should be able to reference off of that and
make the whole frame a little bit flatter. So one way I have the piece of 4 inch
square tube running all the way across, and then here and here I'm gonna have
pieces of 2x4 standing on edge. The vise is going to be connected to this piece,
so that's why it's kind of a bigger piece. I don't know, does that look strong enough,
or do you think it'll collapse when I start to use it? Maybe I should have
over-built it a little bit. I'll start my welding this one,
and then when I put this one on, I'll use a straight edge across here to
get it flat. And after the first tack weld I check it with a square again to make
sure that tack weld didn't warp it. And here I'm putting a shim under the one side
to the level off that joint so it's flat. Now I'm thinking if I just put these right across
the ends, make them square and centered, that should put all of those in the right spot. So I
can just insert these, and end up with an octagon. So you'll notice that for each one of these
I'm rotating it 90 degrees and doing the welding here on the same side. If
there's any twists in this plate, that's going to cause this piece to end
up out of parallel with that piece. And I want to make sure that all of them are out of
parallel the same way, because then when I add the pieces in between here, that will sort of
average that out, and on average it'll be flat. For getting these pieces positioned correctly, I marked the center point right here, and I
also marked the center of the octagon right there. That way I can use my ruler to measure
out how far this needs to be from the center, and I can also put a square against
here to get it at a 45 degree angle. Oh yeah, it turns out that
thing's heavy and I can't pick it up just by squeezing
the tube. A clamp helps that. I had to tack on this little scrap,
because otherwise there's nowhere to put a ground clamp on this thing. The gap
was pretty large on some of these corners, so I had to just use a bunch
of tack welds to fill it in. So after all that welding, I was expecting
this to be warped out of flat by quite a ways, but I'm quite impressed. This is the worst
spot there is, where the straightedge doesn't touch in the middle, but if I press it down
[scraping sounds] so that is close! Anyways, we're ready to move on now, and add the legs.
The legs are going to be in these four positions, and they'll be braced over to the X, which
is kind of the reason to have the X there. So I got the four legs cut. Now, I could either
put these legs on the outside like these are, or I could put them on top of the frame — or
should I say on the bottom of the frame — like this one is. Now this I think is stronger,
however it's reducing the table's footprint, and that'll make it more likely to tip over.
So I have to decide — oh right, I like to make things difficult for myself, so I'm gonna notch
these out and put them half on and half off. Yep. I had to stop it there, because
we're up to the line there. So the next thing I'm gonna do is cut
the end of these legs off at 45 degrees, and cap that. This piece of material right
here against the table isn't doing very much good anyways, because I'm not going to weld it
to the table this close to the edge. I might as well make more room for clamps under the
table by getting rid of this little section. So if you're wondering why I didn't just cut
this at an angle and use a plate to cap it, that's because I wanted this corner
radius to follow around the corner. This is a little more work,
but I think it'll look better. This will give me room for clamps
to go anywhere. This should still be plenty strong especially once
I put a brace across to the X. You can hear the band saw in the background
cutting out some 2x4 inch braces for some of the other legs, but for right now
I'm gonna make the brace for this leg, out of this little piece. It's just going
to be a little tiny brace in the corner, but I think it'll add quite a bit of strength. So that leg gets just that little brace in the
corner, and then this leg and this leg get a similar small brace, but then this leg gets
a lot more bracing, because it's the one that the vise is going to mount on. So it's going to
have a large 4x4 brace going down to that tube, and then on each side will be this 2x4
brace going over to the Octagon. That piece got too short to hold in the bandsaw, so
I'll have to cut it using the angle grinder. Got all the angle braces cut. For this
one, I actually ran out of 2x4 tubes, so I had to splice together some scraps.
All of them are ready to weld in place now. The frame is up to about 300 pounds at
this point and pretty difficult to manage. I got all of the welding done on the
frame. Now I'm gonna go ahead and try to stand this frame up, and then
I'll get started on the vise mount. Next up I'm going to make the vise mount that
sticks out here. This is going to be made from two pieces of 2x4 inch tube. They're
going to be notched around the leg, and welded together like this. And notice
they're going to be a couple inches lower than the table top, which is fine, because that
vise is quite tall and I don't want it that high. I forgot to mention it, but there will be
a plate on top of these, so the vise won't sit directly on the square tubes. It'll sit on a
plate. This is just there to support that plate. Here I'm getting started drilling the holes
where the bolts will go to mount the vise. If you're wondering why I drilled these
holes so big, it's because I like to put bushings through rectangle tube to prevent
the bolt from squashing the tube. In this particular case it's probably not necessary,
because I'm not going to tighten them very tight on that vise anyways, or I'll break
the little cast iron feet off. But as a matter of principle I just never put a bolt
through rectangle tube without a bushing. So these are the right distance
apart for the back feet on the vise, but if you look from the top, you can see
that the front feet are a wider spacing than the back feet. So for the front feet, I'm going
to basically just notch the corner out of here, and then weld the bushing right on to
the edge. And instead of using pipe, I'm going to bore a piece of solid to
make a little better bushing for those. This plate caps the end and
adds a little bit of strength. So obviously at this point it looks super
flimsy, so we need to add a brace in here. And that's going to be exactly the same
as this brace, so they'll be symmetrical. So after putting a straightedge on here like
this, and measuring the gap, I found that it was a little bit out of parallel with the surface
that the table will mount to. So I used this clamp to pull that into square, and while the clamp
is holding that, I'll weld the angle brace in. This isn't quite wide enough to mount the
vise on, so I'm going to weld down this plate. Rather than just leaving this
as a simple rectangle, I'm actually going to profile the outside to approximately
the same shape as the base on the vise. I don't think it's necessary to cut this
exact shape out, so I'm going to connect this point with this point and just make
that a straight line. And then here on the front where this actually sticks out further
than the feet, I'll connect it like this. Alright the frame is all finished up. I got
these corners and these welds all ground flush, so the top of the frame should be perfectly
flat. Now I'm gonna flip this over on top of the plate — I'll probably clean up the
plate a little bit first — and weld it on. I'm gonna use this clamp to squeeze the
table up to the bottom of the frame, to close any gaps that there might be, and I'm
just gonna weld this on at 8 points. So I'm going to weld on each of these corners, and also
on each of these sections. The reason I'm keeping the welds to a minimum is to prevent warping
this 3/4 inch plate any more than I need to, and I'm just gonna weld probably about
an inch long bead on each of those. Great news! I went all the way around with
this piece of paper, and I can't make it go under the octagon anywhere, and I
also can't make it go under the X out here. Which means the tabletop is completely
tight against the frame all the way around. I should have said this earlier, but the way
the plate was sitting here it was bowed like this. So I put the big 4x4 tube right down the
middle of that bow, and then by going all the way around the outside and clamping it tight,
that automatically made it tight in the middle. I'm making some feet to put at the base
of the legs — where feet usually go — I chamfered both of these parts so that they
can be welded together and then ground flush. So this table isn't exactly completely done yet,
but to be honest I am kind of burnt out on this project. I've been working on it for weeks, and
I'm gonna go ahead and flip it right side up now, mount the vise on it, and it'll be done
for now. I still need to make a way to move it using the pellet jack, but I'll deal
with that later, and I'll paint it later. I'm not 100 percent sure how this is going to
work, but I'm going to try to pick up from the vise mount with that crane, and hopefully from
there I'll be able to flip it onto its feet. It seems to be at its balancing point now so
it's ready to come this way when I let it down. That was a pretty long journey, but I got
it up to those two feet — without dying — so now I have to somehow figure out how to roll
it onto its four feet — also without dying. So I used a floor jack to pick it up
to this point, and I'm using a clamp, squeezing the edge of the table, and using the
crane to prevent it from falling all the way over. Well would you look at that! It's right side up.
And for now I can move it around with this setup, just picking it up right in the middle, and it
can't really fall over as long as the feet are only 1/2 inch off the ground. So now I'm going
to move the vise over here and mount it, finally! So I've got the vise mounted. There's
just a tiny gap here, as planned, so the top of the jaws on this vise are at 45-1/4
inch off the floor when the tabletop is at 36. This is a 4 foot long piece of
square tube. I'm doing this just to show that this table does not tip over easily. Well I think that's it for this one.
I'm really happy with the vise mount, it's super rigid and I can work with pretty much
all the way around the vise, to the point that I can hacksaw backwards from either side of the
vise. Also I've never experienced what it's like to have a vise that's just cantilevered out from
a surface like this. There's room under here. I think I like it! Oh and the table is nice too.
I might have another video about painting it and building the pellet jack mobilizer, and
I might not, I don't know. You'll see what it looks like painted in future videos though, as
long as you stick around! Thanks for watching!
