Cheap Milling Machine Vise is CHEAP!

unless you already read the video title you are never going to guess what's in this box i bought another dirt cheap import vice of dubious quality specifically a six inch unibcity machine vise and to be honest have absolutely no idea why i'm so excited completely unwarranted [Music] like it said on the box this is a six inch vise and it's meant to replace the four inch vise i currently have on the milling machine the little four inch has been doing great but it's just a smidge on the small side for this mill if all goes well i'll install the new six inch here and move this four inch to my manual mill it'll replace this rom vise absolutely adore this little vise but the four inch curt clone is a lot more versatile and 100 transparency here this thing has picked up a bit of slack in the fixed jaw and for the life of me i can't figure out how to tighten that out if i hold work too high up in the jaws i pick up a lot of deflection from this fix jaw which ends up in out of square parts i can't figure out how this fixed jaw is attached there's a bolt in the top some kind of adjustment nut another bolt from the bottom but everything spins when i try to tighten it and nothing gets tighter that however is a story for another time but what's not a story for another time is just how massive this new vice is i mean look at this thing it's silly box says it weighs 50 pounds and i believe it i haven't even taken the plastic off this thing and i'm already wondering if i shouldn't have gotten the five inch vice it's very oily there's some scratch marks from the moving jaw we'll check those out later the handle leaves a little something to be desired the paint's just jumping off of it first impressions this is probably the first thing to break doesn't feel bad maybe a little bit on the snug side the pessimist in me is wondering if it's not tightened a little too much to maybe hide something not making any accusations just yet just a dumb guy talking out loud here i don't know looks pretty good quick backstory this is an ebay vice i paid just shy of 150 for it including shipping or free shipping i think as if anything's ever free right 150 that's like three dollars a pound less than i can buy raw cast iron for i don't know how they do it i mean i kind of know how they do it but just between me and you i don't see this race to the bottom ending well for anyone and yes i do see the irony in me contributing to that problem which brings me to the three questions i see written all over your faces first yes i have been eating better and getting some exercise thanks for noticing second also yes i have made this video before i did a full breakdown and inspection of the four inch vise when i got it i'll basically be doing the same here almost exactly the same in fact i'm not even sure if i'll release this video but just in case figured i'd get it all on camera do all the editing add graphics tweak the sounds and make a thumbnail you never know third and probably most important i hear you all asking your collective self this old tony now that you're a youtube millionaire sex symbol rock star why are you wasting your time with a cheap vice like that it's probably junk you know it we know it why not just get a curt orange or whatever high quality usa made vice my friends that is an excellent if a bit long-winded question you ask where do i even start first this whole turning good metal into scrap metal is a hobby for me and although i'm a strong advocate of always buying quality when you can that unfortunately has its limits i probably wouldn't skimp on measuring tools or maybe hand tools in general certainly any tool you reach for or depend on on a consistent basis but you have to stretch the clams out where you can right i mean i have three or four machines that i'd love to deck out with all the best stuff and each of those machines would likely benefit from two or three different style vices well you get the point it's a slippery slope sure if a curt vice just fell in my lap and after i got out of the hospital i certainly wouldn't turn it down but for what one of those things cost and i'm not saying they're not worth it but for what one of those cost i could buy five of these pick the best one throw the other four away and still have money left over for a nice dinner mind you this would be a very different story if my livelihood depended on the quality of my equipment if i were doing this for a living i probably wouldn't look at a vice like this twice second and probably more important you should know i suffer from a medical condition called workshop-induced financial exhaustion best not to exacerbate that but hold on just one minute there cowboy we're getting way ahead of ourselves i still don't know if this is even usable yet it might not even pass as a chunk of cast iron for the scrap bin you may or may not have noticed not counting the size these two vices look a little different i'm not 100 sure on this but this style is typically referred to as a milling machine vice and these are cnc vices of course either one would work in either situation but the cnc variant has two things going on first it has no mounting flanges built in you have to use hold downs or toe clamps or some other way to fix this to your machine table hopefully you can see this has sort of the mounting lugs built in and this does not i believe this is done so you can get more of this style vise on a machine you have more work stations as it were additional work offsets so you can run more parts per setup things you know you might want to do on a cnc machine there is one potential catch here though with this quality of vice if you want to use it in sort of a ganged arrangement like that holy smokes this thing is gigantic if you buy the big name brands spend the cash you can get matched vices meaning their height or dimensions from the bed is identical or to within some crazy small tolerance but if you have two or more vices it probably pays that they be exactly the same with these lower cost imports odds of that happening are probably pretty slim i guess though they do spec a height tolerance so who knows and in addition to not having flanges these are ground all over in theory you could mount these on their sides or on their top if you had to i don't know if i'll ever need that but this maho can be swapped into a horizontal mode you can do horizontal milling here and i thought this might be a nice option to have one thing i do like about these flange devices that i think i'll miss is the little gutter they have cast into the perimeter that helps keep coolant on the machine instead of running off your table not an issue of course on an enclosed cnc but i don't have one of those on my smaller mill for example the rom vice can and has made a mess when i'm running coolant even at low flow rates i'm not talking about those cnc style fire hydrants any coolant that ends up onto the table in the t-slots drains to the coolant pan by the design of the machine but the rom vice likes to take a good portion of that coolant diverted over the table and right onto my feet where the four inch vise would catch that coolant again in this gutter and run it back towards the center out these cutouts and onto the t-slots i don't know if you're hearing that hesitation in my eyes but i'm not finding what i expected to find under here and it just dawned on me i assumed unique body on the box was a typo for a unibody as in single body you see on this vise how the fixed jaw is cast directly into the vice body and machined all as one part compare that to the four inch vise where the fixed jaw is a separate part that's bolted and keyed onto the body after the fact assuming this material and casting is good unibody i imagine would be preferred over a two-piece vice but now i realize why it's called a eunuch body this vice has no ball let's talk just a minute about this angle lock feature that's been plagiarized into this vise see how the nut on this vice crew has an angled surface a greasy angled surface the nut that rides on the screw engages with the moving jaw via that angled surface the inside of the moving jaw has an undercut that matches that surface so this sort of hooks on and drops down it's caught under that surface when this style of angle lock or anglock vise curt style vise pushes on the moving jaw when you tighten the screw and squeeze the vice it's not just pushing straight in because of that angled surface half of that clamping force is going straight down it's holding the moving jaw down onto the vice body and that's to mitigate what's called jaw lift when you tighten stuff in the jaws of a vise the vice is closed across the bottom but sort of open on the top it's like a c-clamp those clamping forces tend to lift this moving jaw which makes a vice frustrating to use they don't always lift depending on where you clamp the part but jaw lift is something very real and this ang lock feature this angle lock feature helps to mitigate that thing is the two angled surfaces usually have like a spherical element between the two of them like a hardened steel ball that creates a more efficient transfer of force from this angled face to the angled face inside of the moving jaw you probably can't see it but these are just rough cast surfaces i mean really bad stuff it's like lunar surface type casting and you can imagine if those two mating surfaces aren't clean and parallel the component of that force that pushes down well i guess even pushing in could try to kick the moving jaw all over the place and then it would rely heavily on just the small machine features that keep this aligned to the body right the body drops in that little machine's track or groove or slot that's actually pretty good but those would have to resist any weird torque from this angle clamping feature as it is it's really just two rough cast faces covered in grease oh wait a minute there is a ball in there well i'll be a monkey's uncle they're usually i think flipped up sort of that way domed out to interface with the angle on the moving nut but if i could get this out of here it's a half sphere that's just a smidge taller than the divot it's sitting in is that a patent avoidance feature or is that how the curt ones work too i could have sworn these were audis and not innies well that's pretty cheese it's like a cast ball bearing or something not very round by the looks of it either but i guess in theory that does the same thing better force transfer between the angled nut and the moving jaw i don't know maybe it's nothing i'm sure the vice probably feels a little crunchier than a curt no surprise there perhaps anyway let's keep breaking this thing down what an emotional rollercoaster ride took the nut and the screw out mixed feelings here but nothing i'm going to complain about given the price was pleasantly surprised to find a bearing in here a thrust bearing i for sure was expecting like bushings bronze thrust washer maybe not the best bearing in the world but you know it's a bearing the screw threads look clean they're regular 60 degree course threads the ad led me to expect acme or trapezoid threads because you know it says it in the ad after the chintzy vise handle this will probably be the next thing to go depending on what kind of parts you work on how hard you're clamping either those are the ones cast into the nut time will tell i suppose okay okay enough with the screwing around already let's get serious here settle down now the vise is completely broken down i degreased it a bit stoned down some of the sharp edges and went through this thing methodically with a fine toothed comb although fun and relaxing i learned absolutely nothing so i switched to an indicator i checked all surfaces for flatness parallelism and squareness i had planned to walk through this with you in excruciating detail but as it turns out there's already a super awesome video on youtube with some old geezer doing the same exact thing so if you're curious how that looks go check that out before i share my conclusions here there's one thing that might be worth recapping measuring squareness judging by some of the comments in that other hex video squareness wasn't that clear how to measure it at home rather so let's head back to this this is a surface gauge and it has a test indicator mounted to it the hole works the surface gauge the indicator and the part we're inspecting are on a surface plate the indicator in and of itself can't actually measure anything it's not like a tape measure that is telling you the cold hard truth an indicator instead compares two things that's all it can do in fact sometimes they're called comparators set up in this way it's comparing the position of its tip to the top of this granite plate for example if i slide this indicator over the top of my part and i zero it out that isn't actually telling me anything i don't know how tall this part is i don't know how flat it is i just don't know anything about it all i did was set up a reference between that tip and the top of the surface plate magic happens when i start to move the surface gauge around for example if i pull it up towards the fixed jaw we can see the indicator increased a thou and a half in this case so i still don't know how big this part is as in taking a measurement but what i do know is that this part of the surface is now a thousand a half higher than this part of the surface what looked flat actually has a bit of a ramp to it a bit of an increasing curve but even that is only true because i'm assuming my surface plate is flat it could very well be that this top surface is perfect and my surface plate has a one thou hole worn in the top again it's only comparing the two at the risk of losing my already thin grasp on reality my assumption is that my surface plate is good so i marked this as plus 10. i measured this with a tens indicator so that's ten ten thousands or a thousandth plus ten because that's coming up i did not mark my surface plate minus 10 because it's going down because mental health if i wanted to actually measure this i would need a gauge block or a stack of gauge blocks of about you know the same height then i can compare the two and then either add or subtract from my gauge block stack until this thing tells me zero difference between the two and only then do i know how tall this part is again the only thing this thing is doing is comparing all right that's all fine and great but now let's say we want to measure the squareness of this side how square this is to my surface plate well if i just run my indicator into it it doesn't really do much i mean i guess if i try hard enough i could break my indicator but that wouldn't tell me anything about the squareness in order to figure that out we're going to need something else to compare this to we'll use the indicator to compare this surface to a known square surface just the way we compared this surface to a known flat surface my apologies i know that hurt for some of you to listen to but it's important we establish the rules of this game so we've got a known flat surface that we're comparing other surfaces to to get the perpendicularity we're going to need a known perpendicular surface part to set our indicator up against so then we can go to town with our part in this case i just pulled out a one two three block i actually use a granite reference square these two surfaces are 90 degrees to each other comes with a certificate all that nonsense so again so we don't lose our minds it's something we can trust i appreciate not everyone has one of these or is willing to buy one of these so we'll just use a known good one two three block or you can use a v block a grinding vice anything you trust to be perpendicular anything you trust to be square this is very important all of the other measurements we're about to take on the part we're interested in will be based on this if this is off all of the readings will be off here's the bit that i think confuses some people in this type of squareness measurement you can buy more expensive dedicated squareness measuring kit but it's going to cost you at least an eye maybe a kidney i'm not sure what the going prices are for those things these days it's been a while since i've been in that business anyway squareness refers to two surfaces you can't have just one square surface it's got to be square with respect to something the surface gauge only has one bottom surface to compare to we need to somehow adapt this to measure a second surface perpendicular to that and you may have noticed this indicator has a bumper installed on it i installed this myself you could just mill a slot in these and then lock tight in a piece of mild steel whatever you like just sort of grind it around so it has a you know high spot on the front how round this is or what the radius is is not critical let me set this up and i'll explain what we're doing i've set up the indicator so the tip is just barely touching the one two three block when the one two three block touches the bumper basically i've set it up so i'm within range of my fine adjust let's take a look from the top now if i roll my block around that radiused bumper you can see the indicator picks up a maximum point of contact right now it's making it to about 6 7 out again my part is up against this bumper and because it's round that results in a high spot what i'm going to do is look for that high spot and zero my indicator to that now any place except that high spot the indicator will fall away from the indicator never goes past zero there we have it the surface gauge and indicator are now set up to measure squareness let's pull our part in i'm going to run this bumper into my part being careful to keep constant contact between that bumper and the part that i'm measuring just sort of roll it in and see if i can pick up the high spot with the indicator so it's going past zero see as i roll it the indicator is coming up hitting that max and then coming down again the max reading looks to be about one division on this indicator which is five tenths that's half of a thousandth of an inch because it's going past zero that means this surface is leaning in towards me remember this is our squareness reference and we zeroed it out this is what squareness means so if the indicator is coming closer it means the parts coming closer this vise three inches up from the base is half a thou out a square greater than 90 degrees so that's how you measure squareness i hope that cleared up a few things and didn't make matters worse i know what you're asking what if i don't have a surface gauge with a bumper well before i installed this bumper my surface gauge was just a regular surface gauge this one is smaller but you'll get the idea surface gauges have this notch cut out of them you can see the original one back there and in a pinch you can drop a ball bearing in there and use that as your bumper it's how i measured squareness for years before i got so fed up with losing this ball that i installed that bumper in it but you know maybe a magnet or some grease or something same idea you just use that ball as the bumper you roll your indicator around to summarize i am absolutely shocked if not flabbergasted that i didn't get more than i paid for granted there are two sides to every story first it's a piece of junk sorry to be so blunt but on the other hand it was 150 bucks it did come with this little report card inspection report technology document operation instruction test certificate packing list i don't even know why they ship with these things this little accuracy test does call out zbj 5 2017-90 which in granted two seconds of googling i could not find it's got a permissible error and an actual error actual is not filled out you know i wrote this stuff in myself the pencil is me is what i'm saying these specs are in metric now i'm totally good with metric some of my best friends are metric but from i don't know half a millimeter up to about 20 meters maybe above that i'm completely lost 100 kilometers means absolutely nothing to me even though i know exactly what 60 miles feels like and ditto for the low end 0.015 millimeters i get that that's a small measurement but it's not the same as six tenths to me so i just use google translate so it's talking my language though i haven't been able to completely figure this out i think some of these images don't go with the text like g1 is parallelism of top guide surface to vice bottom but that to me looks like this picture parallelism of measuring block top surface device bottom that one looks like it's got a block in it i don't know i just sort of gave up but i think the actual columns is left blank for a reason for example i saw jaw lift where was jaw lift lifting and measuring block permissible is six tenths i'm measuring a smidge over a thou almost double permissible the vice body isn't square it's trapezoidal the sides aren't parallel the jaws are remarkably square but there's a thou dip in the bed they maybe did this fast and hot and the middle came up or the palm sander they're using to surface grind this needs to be dressed but here's the thing ideally a good vise properly mounted should be almost invisible to use like it becomes part of the milling machine that you trust sure you have to use proper technique make sure everything is clean etc but i would not recommend a vise like this to the sort of person that its price tag is likely to attract case in point the bed is rather flat in the x direction fixed jaw is square clamping four seems good even though there's a bit more jaw lift than they technically don't permit but that starts to fall off pretty fast in the y direction it goes from a thou down to zero in the span of two or three inches if you have small parts in this vise you could probably get away with that error but if your parts start to reach mid span which is very easy to do since you bought a six inch vise then you'd pick up a one thou error per side flip your part over to the machine the other side and now you're the lucky winner of a two thou error shore is a hobbyist so you can probably make this work but you have to be constantly mindful that the vice might be working against you part of me was hoping the gamble would pay off you know maybe they're getting better at making cheap stuff sure the iron might suck it might crack in half if i squeeze too tight but maybe i could get away with it the way i did with the taiwanese vertex vice despite everything i said i think i'm gonna try this vice on for size until something better comes along for the amount of work i think i'll do on this mill i get more from the added size than i lose from the extra attention i have to pay in using this thing as you can see i did make some clamps to hold this thing down and in its defense it does technically squeeze stuff and works for now as a cnc vise all right so that may be some buyer's remorse is all i've got for today hope you enjoyed that and thanks for watching

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 745,846

Rating: 4.9448214 out of 5

Keywords: milling vise, cnc vise, cnc milling vise, ebay vise, cheap import vise, cheap mill vise, squareness, surface plate, indicator

Id: Zl6wpdtBZhk

Length: 24min 54sec (1494 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021