Building the Ultimate Striking Anvil + Post Vise Combo!

hey I'm Chris after making everything and today we are making an awesome 300 pound striking and we'll post vice combo let's get into it [Music] alright so this project consists of a couple of key components I've got a six-inch post vise some 1 inch by 12 inch mild steel and some 2-inch thick mild steel and I'm gonna start by just prepping a little bit of the edge of this plate I bought all this 1 by 12 steel on Craigslist from a guy a scrap guy and these were actually the base of a huge printing press in New York City and I bought about 60 feet of it and been kind of looking for projects to use it on so I'm just sort of prepping everything and checking some dimensions alright so I did some laughs we've got two inch mild steel plate we've got one inch mild steel plate this is one by twelve this piece of two inch is eight eighteen so it'd be a nice big surface I'm gonna put a hardy hole in it but my air compressor is acting up so I feel like I might as well cut this now I've got this nice cutting table that I built I made a video on this and the whole purpose of putting this thing I'll wheel so that I could take piece like this put it on the table so now I just have to ship it to the table and it's got a heavy caster so it should be ok but this plates not light it's 43 pounds of foot all right so this is what I'm going to use to cut up this plate now this is a Lincoln tomahawk 1000 it's a high-powered plasma cutter that they make and this thing will actually Pierce inch and quarter steel and easily cut through the one-inch plate that we're using and one of the big things with using the plasma cutter in any shop because you've got a lot of smoke and a lot of sparks that are coming off of it so I'm gonna use my plasma cutting table that I made in a past video that'll keep the sparks contained and then for the smoke I'm gonna use this Lincoln mini flex which is a fume extractor I use a lot for take welding and any plasma coating just to keep the smoke managed this thing's gonna eat up the smoke keep my shop from eating smoke and protect my lungs so it's not to steal so as a cutting guide when I'm using my plasma torch I just put a little bit of eighth inch aluminum flat stock I clamp it on with some little mini C clamps and I've got these little roller wheels on that torch head just so that it makes it roll a little bit easier now when you're cutting the one-inch plate with this plasma torch you've got to move pretty slowly so having something to guide your hand is really helpful and being able to move that little fume extractor nozzle as I go just sort of helps keep the smoke from filling the entire shop so once I cut through that I also had this little bit of quarter-inch angle that I'm gonna be using somewhere else on the project so I figured I would cut that as well you can see how nicely that table that I made captures the sparks and they really basically all go down into the collector and then they go down into a bucket that's got water in it once I get those cut up I bring the plates outside and I start to take some of the mill scale and paint off the 1 by 12 plate has a bunch of paint on it and rust so I just sort of took this cupped wire wheel from faired and got rid of all that and then you know the mill scale on this heavy plate was really really tough I wound up kind of giving up on the mill scale at first and just going to bevel my edges I used the fared Victo grain which is an a structured abrasive from them it cost you materials so well you actually have to kind of take it easy because it's really almost easy to remove too much than you want and this stuff makes quick work of beveling those sides and actually starts to do a good job of taking the mill scale off if you've ever worked with thicker plate you know how tough the mill scale can be once you get kana into plate over 1 inch thick so I tried with a cupped wire wheel and wound up going back to one of their victim rain disks on a 7-inch grinder and it just helped me penetrate that mill scale and get that piece of plate nice and clean and even I went through just one disc on this using light pressure and was able to get it all done nice now for the legs of this I'm gonna use some quarter-inch thick 2x3 steel tubing and I like to cut this stuff up on the rack the 20-foot length of it weighs a ton I can't move it down by myself so I just go up onto my table and I use my porta band to cut up the pieces and bring them down one at a time this is just sort of an easier system than trying to manage a huge piece of plate and it's a kind of great reason to use a battery-powered porter band like this I love this thing saves me a ton of time and effort so one of the key things here is that I need these legs to be out on an angle and also pivoted forward a little bit because I want the leg of the post vise to land on another post in here so I had done a rough calculation and I used this little digital angle finder to figure out that I wanted about a 20 degree angle off of this would put me out far enough with the length leg so I'm gonna just make a quick template out of 2x4 just to make sure that I'm right and then I'll cut my steel this thing can change angles but I never really trust a little angle gauge on it so typically if I am doing something kind of precise I will cut a wood block or a metal block on the bandsaw and I'll use that to just line up my angle just trying to press it against the area so as you saw in that little note after I had cut these to the 20 degree angle I decided to change it to an 8 degree angle and this you know essentially have the throw and made the whole footprint of the assembly a lot smaller which will be a little bit better once those legs were caught I actually moved back over to the 2 inch piece of plate marked out a spot with some DICOM and started to scribe out the 1 inch square hole that I was going to mill in to make a hardy hole in the striking animal itself so I marked five points there the four corners and the centre and then I went over to my Bridgeport and I took the second jaw off my Kurt vise so that I would be able to actually rest the plate on top of the movable jaw and then I set up a system of clamps and I decided that this would kind of be the most rigid way for me to use this I could have turned the plate 90 degrees but I would have had to use some sort of Jack's underneath it and I just kind of liked orienting it bit in this direction so I drilled some pilot holes here in those four corners and my whole purpose here was to drill solid pilot holes all the way through and then drill a one-inch hole in the center and then kind of follow it around with a milling bit to make the square I snapped that drill bit off in the hole and then proceeded to continue with a little more care you know this is two inch solid steel so it's not very easy to drill through with a small drill bit like that for the center hole I stepped up I started with probably a 3/8 bit and just sort of worked my way up through the sizes until I got up to a one-inch drill hole and then I can move over to an endo what's critical here is just clearing the chips using plenty of lubricant and stepping up through the motions so that you're not putting too much load on any single drill bit now before I can go ahead and get the end mill in I have to get the broken drill bit out that I snapped so since I drilled such a large hole I can actually see the path of the original drill bit that broke and I can get in there with some pics and some chisels to get it out now if you didn't have a big hole in the center it would be very difficult to get that drill bit out you could try and locate it from the backside and try to drill until you hit it the problem is when you hit a drill bit with another drill bit chances are one of them is going to fail so I was lucky that the way that I drilled my hole you could see that path pretty clearly and I was able to knock it out with a chisel now back over on the milling machine I grabbed a quarter inch carbide end mill and I started to take some paths around the perimeter of this one-inch hole I noticed that my clamp wasn't enough so I put a piece of quarter-inch bar across it and use a pretty much like a hold down set up with some threaded rod and that made everything super sturdy and I was able to continue moving it's amazing how much load gets put on a piece of steel when you're milling it even when you think something's tight it can still have a tendency to move around so using a carbide end mill just sort of running around this and trying to make sure that I don't go over my limits taking a lot of passes but eventually coming up with a really nice clean one-inch hole that was exactly what I was looking for I laid it out on top of the one-inch plate and then just took a sharpie mark down into the one-inch plate and then I can go back over to the plasma cutter and I can Pierce out this square hole just so that my hole goes all the way through now piercing through one-inch plate with a plasma torch is difficult so I had to kind of take two little tries at it to get that hole once the hole is pierced though the torch makes quick work of it and I'm able to just walk around that square and knock it out now plasma torches can cut on a bit of a bevel so I try to knock it out from the bottom and actually what I'm having knock it out from the other side I use my chisel to get rid of some of that slag and overall it worked out exactly how I wanted it to it's a little bit oversized so that I don't have to worry about any of my Hardy tools hitting it now I can go ahead and start to prep the mounting bracket for the post slice itself so I use the plasma torch again and what I like about this little plasma table is that I can take out those slats so that I'm not constantly cutting into it and I used my little piece of aluminum as a guide and cut a little bit of this angle plate and I can snap that off and keep working on it I wanted to cut some bevels in it that would just sort of look nice and clean and just try to give it a little bit of a more design aesthetic instead of just utilitarian cutting these little bevels in there gave it a little bit more appeal so the mounting bracket on the post vise uses this wedge system that you would bolt down to a table and you could kind of adjust the height and it's a really nice setup but it takes up a lot of real estate and I didn't want this thing to be any bigger than it had to be so I grabbed some half-inch thick stainless steel and I marked out a bracket that I would drill and tap and I could use some half-inch bolts to essentially recreate the mounting bracket that was originally on the vise now you're gonna see later that this bracket that I'm making didn't wind up working out just because I didn't like the way it looked but I figured it's worth showing the process of making it in case you're interested so I'm drilling this out to tap it with a half thirteen tap and you know with working with stainless it's considerably more difficult than working with mild steel but the tapping head that I used with the half-inch thirteen tap still made quick work of tapping these this is at at matok fifty X if you do any sort of tapping if you watch any of my videos you see me use these all the time you can see how quickly I'm able to just was half their team tap through this solid half-inch stainless and that's really impressive doing that by hand would have been a real nightmare I'm using my broad backs ironworks 2 by 72 grinder here super-strong machine makes total quick work of deburring and cleaning up these edges making this plate look really nice and then you can see the way I line it up with the little piece of angle that I made and I just sort of mark out some holes so that I can drill some holes in the angle and mount this whole thing together I drilled oversized holes in this for the half-inch Hardware just so that I knew I would have some clearance I want it to be able to move this around if I need to just in case things you know didn't line up properly or if the vise was a little bit a square so I drilled a 5/8 inch hole here now back over with all that work done I can start to lay out my legs you can see how shallow that angle is now when I revised it to 8 degrees versus the 20 and I just do a little bit of layout with my speed square so that I can make sure that the two legs on the front wind up in the same spot now it's important to make this thing a tripod because I always wanted to sit level on the floor I never wanted to rock if I had done it with 4 legs especially in my shop the floor is super uneven it would have been had a great potential to rock now for the welding on this project I'm gonna be using this 360 MP from Lincoln Electric and I'm gonna be using the Lincoln outer shield which is a flux core wire with the c25 gas it's gonna be a really strong penetrating weld and it's really gonna help with this 1 inch plate this is a newer machine from Lincoln this does mig TIG and stick it'll do pulse MIG and pulse TIG it's a super versatile machine for a shop and I'm gonna put some information in some links down below you should definitely check it out before I go and start welding into the one inch plate I just beveled the edges again with a Victorian disc and I use this Lincoln adjustable angle clamp to make sure everything stays nice and sturdy in place I can tack everything in before I go in and fully weld it now using outer shield is something that not a lot of people are familiar with this is a flux core wire that you would see in a gasless machine but it's also using the C 25 you know typical MIG welding gas and this just creates a really strong and penetrating weld it's very very smooth it does develops like you're welding with a stick welder that you'll chip off but when you're welding into heavier plate it actually ups the capacity of your machine and allows you to well thicker material with ease now with those pieces tacked on I wanted to cut and tack on the crossbar so you saw how I just marked it out with a sharpie and I'm just sort of cutting based on those Sharpie marks with this saw I don't know what the angles were on this I didn't actually go and measure them but I figured you know using it kind of live like that cutting and fitting it you can see how it fit really nicely in there and I tacked it into place now I'm doing everything tight to the table because I'm gonna add feet to this whole assembly so I don't have to worry about this crossbar interfering with the way this sits on the ground because there's gonna be 3/8 inch thick feet underneath it now once everything was tacked I was able to go in and weld it and there's something very different about welding with an outer shield wire it just lays on super smooth it's like glass it's really a pleasure when you're used to working with MIG it doesn't spark up as much and when you pop off the slag the welds look really great and it's a really good setup for using thicker material like this you can see I'm using my mini Flex again the outer shield does produce a bit more smoke kind of like a flux core well buzz so you want to make sure that you're managing your smoke and you're not breathing all that stuff in so having air move and you know making sure that you're using a fume extractor is important and I'm focusing my heat so that I'm properly welding into this one inch plate I had cleaned it all prior and you know overall I'm really happy with the penetration and the welds that I got in this you can see that little wire brush I'm using is a angled brush it's got the wire is kind of converging to a point it's really good for cleaning inside corners and this is another furtive racers product I noticed that that leg was a little out of square so I cut some welds and just made sure that I got everything lined up right before I welded it on I wanted it to be nice and perpendicular I didn't want this thing that looked like it was welded with one eye shut [Music] now there's one other leg component I wanted to put in which was a spreader that would go from the back third leg into that crossbar I decided to turn this on its side give me a little more surface area there I'm gonna be mounting the mounting block for the bottom of the post vise on this so having it sideways kind of looked good and I've considered maybe putting a shelf down there as well in the future so just made sure everything was nice and centered made some marks tacked everything in and then went through and fully welded it and this is spaced about a half an inch off of the floor actually no it's spaced one inch off the floor because this is two by three tubing and I'm level with the top so the 2 by 3 tubing that I used on this is super robust it's really heavy and I think it's gonna make this whole thing just that much stronger by the time I'm done this whole assembly weighs over 300 pounds so even just without the 2 inch plate it was already starting to gain some mass now before I weld the 2 inch plate to the top I want to mount the vise mount to the actual 1 inch plate so I marked out a couple of spots with a sharpie and then went through and refined those measurements with a tape measure and a pencil and then I can go ahead and drill the holes in this piece of angle once everything's laid out again since I'm gonna be using half-inch Hardware on all this I want to oversize these holes I decided to just go straight with a 5/8 inch drill bit and if you watch my last video I just recently got an iron worker but when I did this project the iron worker wasn't set up yet it would have been really convenient to have it because I could have punched all these holes and I would have saved myself a ton of time versus drilling but overall this is just some cheap silver and Demming drill bits that I got on Amazon and they work incredibly well I'll leave a link to the set in the description with all those holes drilled I can do a little bit of layout here I just marked everything out with a sharpie again and then I went through and did a center punch so that I'd be ready to drill these other holes using my mag drill this is an evolution mag drill and I'm going to be using a 5/8 inch annular cutter also from evolution if you're not familiar with mag drills it's a essentially a portable drill press that uses an electromagnet to stick to steel material or anything that is magnetic and then you can drill on site and move your drill to the work instead of moving your work to the drill you can imagine I never would have been able to get this piece onto any sort of drill press and drilling a 5/8 inch hole with a hand drill would have taken me a long long time so using an annular cutter which is essentially a small hole saw with carbide teeth and the mag drill I was able to drill these three holes in relatively short amount of time the only thing that can be a little inconvenient about using a mag drill is the electromagnet does attract a lot of chips so you have to constantly clean up make sure that nothing gets stuck underneath it check in that half-inch hardware and looks good I have a little bit of clearance so that there's some room for me to kind of move the post vise around if I have to make any adjustments now with all the mounting hardware on there I'm able to verify the length of the leg so that I can cut the leg of the post vise and I know they're gonna be comments about you know the travesty of me cutting this post vise you know post vices like this are relatively rare but you can get them and I did keep the leg or I guess if I ever really wanted to put this thing back in a full service I could bevel and weld that thing back together but I got this vise from my friend Chris cash you should check him out on Instagram and on YouTube I'll put some links to his information down in the description and mount Phillip Metalworks he hooked me up with this thing and when I asked him if it was a big deal for me to cut it he said nope cut it make it work so I use his blessing now I'm able to set up my mount a little temporary setup here and I can cut off those half-inch bolts you can see how big that piece of 1/2 inch stainless looks on there and you probably starting to understand why I eventually changed it out but knowing that everything functions wow this was a great feeling knowing that everything kind of still fit together and look good and I can position and get ready to weld the 2 inch plate to that top of the 1 inch plate i disassembled device and got the 2 inch plate clamped down with these big strong hand clamps just to make sure it didn't move at all I'm gonna be putting a lot of heat into this thing checked all my clearances you can see the bevel underneath the 2 inch and then I geared up the 360 MP and start attacking it into place now I was really focused on getting my heat right on this I have my fume extractor running you can see the smoke coming off of it and I you know wanted to make sure that I got a nice weld on this I wanted to make sure that this thing wasn't gonna go anywhere none of these welds were gonna crack while it was getting hit so overall I'm really happy with the way these welds came out I think that this thing isn't going anywhere and the clamps definitely help make sure there wasn't any hollow spots in there you wouldn't want to have any gaps between those two pieces of steel the amount of heat that went into this piece was tremendous it stayed hot for a couple hours I was surprised how long it took for it to cool but that just helps me know that these welds are really gonna stick now like I said I wanted to make some feet for it so this is just some 3/8 plate that I had laying around and I drilled some holes in there for 3/8 hardware if I ever put drop-in anchors in my floor I always use 3/8 just because it's a real common size it's nice and strong so I made three feet two of them in the same size one of them is a little bit bigger so that it can fit on that third leg and I ground and deeper these on the broad back ironworks grinder using a 36 grit belt from faired and then I just used this hole saw to drill the mounting plate for the bottom of the post itself now it's important to keep that post from wiggling around so I drilled a hole that would fit nicely around the leg itself and once that was done I can weld it on and it'll keep the post from wiggling if I'm putting a lot of strain on it I would decide it to weld he's on the floor because once I had welded that two-inch plate to the top of this thing it was really hard to move this around again just sinking some heat near there make sure these wouldn't move and I had to grind the weld on top so that I could put that little plate for the leg in the right spot without it getting affected by the old weld once I got everything lined up I could weld it in place so while I was thinking about building this I was think about how I could put wheels on it and these are actually broken casters that we're on a heavy machine and while I was moving it the bearing pivot sheared off and I think they might be perfect they're just gonna require a little bit of modification to get them on there but we're going to test fit on first so originally I thought I could actually just use the chrome-plated mounts that the wheels had before they broke after looking at him I realized they were just kind of too cheesy I spent way too much time making this thing robust to use some garbage metal and and try to make it work so I decided to go and grab a piece of 2x3 stock that I had now this is thinner wall material this is eighth wall and I realized that I could essentially use this to make the mount with little effort so what I did was I marked out the two brackets that I need to make and I drilled a hole through both sides so I wouldn't have to do any alignment later and then you'll see once I move over to the bandsaw I'm able to cut these up in a kind of creative way and then use these as wheel mounts without having to go through and jig something up and do multiple welds I didn't have to do anything other than some drilling and cutting to make these two wheel mounts I was pretty happy with the way this came out just because it was so clean and it saved me a lot of time so I cut the top section of the tube off right there and you can see the wheel mounts starting to take shape over on the grinder I'm able to get some of the burrs off of there and clean up the insides and I want these to look even so that they you know look symmetrical and it really turned out good it's nice having a big platen on a grinder like this because you can get inside and around it and really utilize that two inch wide sanding strip to its full capabilities I was able to use the original hardware and just throw some spacers on there and you can see how these solid steel wheels look really good inside these new steel brackets now I space them off the floor by about a sixteenth of an inch because again I don't want the wheels to affect the way the Vice stands on the ground if they were touching the floor and the floor had a high spot they might make it rock so since there's a little bit of gap there's still close enough that they're easy to roll but far enough away that they're not gonna affect the way it sits once I had them tacked on I was able to go through and weld them in fully and the fact that these wheels are solid steel I never have to worry about any you know hot metal getting on them or any other rubber counting kind of getting messed up like you can on rubber wheels the thing was really getting heavy at this point I was actually not able to tip it by hand so I threw a strap in there and a punch and I used that crack in my floor to kind of leverage it over so I've come to realize that I I don't like the way this bracket looks I mean it came out nice and I like that it's you know flush cut stainless and it's it's really strong but it just looks stupid so this is the original mounting setup for the post lights and the way this works is with a series of wedges this goes around the the leg of the vise and I don't want to cut this because I can actually use this on another vise that I have that's missing this setup and making one of these would be pretty difficult so I conveniently have a drop of some 3/8 tubing that might just work to go around the leg of the vise if I cut out the web either way I'm going to find a piece of material and then I'm going to use these [Music] coupler nuts and I'm gonna weld those to the sides and that'll allow me to pull in on the Vice and I think this is gonna be a nice a lot nicer of a solution I think it's going to look a little bit nicer when it's done it's definitely gonna be less bulky and also be more out of the way of any of my material that I'm trying to work so after I cut that piece of tubing I realized it wasn't gonna fit properly over the vise body so I went over to my oxy-acetylene tanks and I decided to use the torch to kind of bend it around it and make sure it fit nice so you can see I'm able to use my Harris quick connects and my harris cutting torch and this is just a super convenient setup to kind of break down and set up the torch and I got this piece nice and hot and then just hammered it over the leg of the vise and this just kind of helped ease it around it was just a little bit too small so by getting it hot hammering it down and then hammering it back in on the sides I was able to sort of stretch the metal so that it would fit nicely and get around there without getting deformed and looking stupid I gave it some time to cool and then I grabbed the coupler nuts that I mentioned before clamped them on and welded them now before I welded them I took these into my sand blaster and I just blasted some of the zinc coating off of them just so that they wouldn't burn off so much when I was welding I wanted to get really nice penetrating welds on here because there's gonna be a lot of force on them to pull them off the amount of force you can get out of a 1/2 inch bolt is tremendous and it could easily crack a weld with all that done I brought all the parts outside and decided to wire wheel some of the rust and paint off of this post vise like I said my friend Chris cash got this for me I'm not really sure the history of it but it needed a little bit of cleanup before I could give it the linseed oil treatment and now boiled linseed oil is just a great finish for raw steel stuff like this it preserves it and gives it a nice rich look I also brought the striking anvil outside and I was able to wire wheel that and do any sort of grinding of the welds that needed to be ground off for the most part I left the welds on ground on the there was no reason to really get rid of him except for the stuff on the backside I wanted a nice flat flat face and any spatter that might have gotten on the top and I old this as well once the oil I kind of set up I decided to do my assembly so I use the half inch hardware to get the angle plate in tighten everything down and then I can give the new mounting bracket a try using those half-inch bolts again and bolting this in a little bit at a time to make sure that it sits on there nice and square you can see how it puts tension on that spring and this is what makes a post vice so nice as that spring tension so that as you open the vise it swings open and then when you close it it's supposed to be a fast action so when you're working with hot material it you don't lose any time tightening and loosening a vise I can put the screw box back on and take off that clamp and see how nicely it's working do a little bit of fine adjustment making sure that everything is lined up square and then I can go ahead and cut the ends of those half-inch bolts off now this bracket just looks a lot nicer than the original stainless one I made and I'll hold on to that piece of stainless and try to find some way to use it you can see that once I get the handle up it's really easy for me to roll this thing around and I brought it over to my host so that I could get a weight on it this is a one ton crane scale this thing is awesome just for kind of picking machinery up and knowing how heavy it is if you follow me on instagram you've seen me use this a lot and there's the weight 306 pounds the vise weighs about 75 pounds I'd waited before so the whole assembly is super robust I was gonna add sand to the legs but it seems totally unnecessary and you can see how easy it rolls across the shop I'm super happy with how this thing came out it's exactly what I wanted and I can't wait to get using it it's gonna be so helpful I've already used it a bunch trying to just straightening and moving things around the shop you know grabbing stuff in that vise and banging things on that piece of steel I don't have to worry about messing up one of my nice animals all right that about does it for this video I really enjoy building this I've spent the last couple months in the shop just sort of organizing and kind of recalibrating this place for the beginning of 2020 and it felt really good to get back into an awesome project where I got to do some welding some grinding and a little bit of kind of on-the-fly fabricating so this thing was inspired by Terry Estes and he's on Instagram here Estes Forge fabricate now he makes and sells striking anvil combos just like this so if you're interested in something like this I encourage you to reach out to Terry he's in Texas and he's making these things pretty much every week and putting them up for sale and they're a really great product I was really inspired by all the great work that he's done he gave me a bunch of information as to how I should set this one up which was really helpful so thanks Terry if you have any questions about anything I did in this video leave them down in the comments below I'd be happy to answer them and if you want to see what I'm doing behind the scenes you can follow me on Instagram as well right here and make everything shot but post everyday when I'm working in the shop on my stories and I share a lot of behind the scenes stuff and answer questions on the fly so I hope you enjoyed this I can't wait to get using it got a bunch of blacksmithing projects coming up and I hope you'll be there to watch them so thanks again I'm Chris Deb can make everything and I'll see you on the next video

Channel: Make Everything

Views: 246,275

Rating: 4.8939562 out of 5

Keywords: Make, maker, blacksmith, striking anvil, diy anvil, how to make a striking anvil, post vise, restoration, 360MP, lincoln plasma cutter, lincoln tomahawk 1000, lincoln mini flex, pferd abrasives, dual shield welding, outershield welding, how to weld, how to weld an anvil, blacksmith vise, blacksmithing, alec steel vise, post vise restoration, fabricator, forged, torch, plate anvil, how to make, how to make an anvil, how to cut steel, magnetic drill, mag drill, evolution mag drill

Id: ypsf4it2Flc

Length: 35min 14sec (2114 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020