I Built This From A 1957 Popular Mechanics Magazine. Does It Work?

before the internet one platform was king and that was the magazine they have pages filled to catch your eye like tools inventions and things to buy they would always educate entertain and inspire all you needed to do was submit your subscription flyer [Music] i have stacks and stacks of all this history so let's open one up and uncover the mystery let's take a look at popular mechanics november 1957. see what it has in store for us today submachine guns 1795 is that real can you is that a real machine gun delivered to your door yeah right that's so funny everything new for 1958 appraisal of the new models oh man can you imagine going to the dealer 1958 to get a corvette sign me up i always thought those imperials were cool wall tv set 16 inches deep that must have been a big one 16 inch tv the big screen shoot i think ipads are about that big now electric car has 12 dollar motor that little motor and that little car that's funny only if they knew now what tesla's had in them oh walt disney's mechanical wonderland oh yeah there's the hippo at disneyland oh i see how it comes out of the water pretty simple if i was much younger i think i would apply for that job i think you'd see a lot of fun stuff learn a lot of interesting things and meet a lot of talented people to make the machines and design the machines and maintain the machines hair size hole made by drill operating at frequencies of 28 000 cycles per second a tiny brass drill bit tipped with diamond paste can bore a hole about the diameter of a human hair a little tiny thing look it's a little tiny arrow you probably can't see that so there's a match tip and then the holes next to it mechanical aids for the doctor that equipment it's you know what when you still go to the doctor's office it still kind of looks like that nobody knows what any of that stuff does look at that lamp a modern tv lamp that one's kind of neat looking that would be a fun weekend project to recreate that one i don't know it's kind of space ag spacey air drive outboard motor powers ice fishing sled now we're talking that looks fun to build and there's plans [Music] see i know i'm in the right place when there's a shaper in the photo and a horizontal milling machine unlike right at home when they got chucking the threaded rod when chucking a threaded end of a rod you can avoid damage to the threads by simply wrapping the length of wire oh wrapping wire around the threads before putting it in the chuck that's a good tip i'll have to remember that one the marlin 336 carbine this one puts the meat in the freezer [Laughter] so to give you guys an update i have not heard anything about my jet engine plans unfortunately i want to see if i can get plans for something mechanical pencil calculator what pencil calculator gives answers not a slide ruler for two dollars and 25 cents so i'm gonna throw some money into an envelope and see if i can get a mechanical pencil calculator back from 1958 maybe get lucky maybe not maybe i'll get a cool letter back who knows but i'm going to try it see what happens well this is interesting looks like mr logan's from florida he has a carnival shop looks like he makes woodworking things totem poles he's an artist he makes signs he's even converted his bandsaw to left hand operation this is a really interesting gentleman i betcha if he was around today he would have a youtube channel this vice says made by logan holds a horse carving as a pretty interesting construction it's kind of similar to my big floor vise but a little bit lighter duty i've never seen a vise with this type of construction and i think i would like to try to make it i've never built anything like this so i think we should go for it let's build mr logan's vice before we get started i have some concerns with mr logan's vice design the first being that it looks like the dynamic jaw is a little weak and could bend the second is it looks like the center of gravity is off so when you put something large in the jaws it could tip over and the third being i wonder how strong this whole design is in general so we're gonna put it on the test probe and see how much force it can generate so the first problem i have to solve is that in the popular mechanics magazine i have no dimensions no plans no nothing to build mr logan's vice so to get the drawing started i need to find an object in the photo to pull scale from i thought about using mr logan's hat his cigar or even his hammer but all of these things vary in size so that's not a good idea the one thing that mr logan and i share is that we both have arms so i hope mr logan doesn't mind that i borrow his i'm going to be using logan's wrist to elbow distance and when i measured my arm i came up with a distance of 11 inches it may not be perfect but it's going to get me close the vise then sits approximately three arms tall and about two arms wide this is going to give me the good starting point to make the cad model and this is what i came up with it may not be exact but it looks pretty dang close i'd like to try and recreate mr logan's vice exactly as it has in the photo without making any changes first once we see if this design works or doesn't work we can make changes to the model and then i'll make the plans available to you guys on the fireball tool website so it looks like logan used 8 inch channel iron some 2x2 angle iron some heavy duty plate steel and a wide flange or i-beam so this is going to be fun so let's get started welding the main frame of the vise i called out for the mainframe to be made out of 8 inch c-channel and this weighs 13 pounds per foot miter cut on both ends for that classy seamless joint look so this c-channel is the base of the vise this structural member here is the main support column and i'm going to get these suckers welded at a 90 degree angle i can choose to do this vertically or i can do it on its side i think i'm going to try doing it on its side it's going to be much more accurate that way the problem with c-channel is that it's never perfect what i mean by that is this leg is not parallel to the bottom if you picture a staple the two legs can be bowed in or out so by laying it on its side i can obviously tell that it's leaning to one direction so i'm going to be using the mega square here and holding it from the outside of the corner it's going to take care of the squareness and the roll of each component at the same time so i'm using a dual shield flex core wire to weld this together it's basically a hard wire with some flux inside of it and then it uses a argon gas to help shield it this is a structural welding process it burns hot it gets great penetration and it's fast but if you're going to try something like this you're going to want to get yourself some good gloves because the heat that radiates off this weld is crazy i could not explain to you how hot it is so get yourself a good set of gloves preferably something like this gauntlet to protect yourself if you want to try a welding like this now that the channel is welded at 90 degrees it's time to keep them there so we need to add a support and i'd like this flat plate to be touching this flat plate so i'm gonna have to do some fancy notching with the cutting torch to get it all to fit nice and neat now judging from the photo he has it set about six inches from the back and it looks like about 10 inches from the top i don't really care what the angle is because you can use a piece of plywood cardboard or even another piece of metal get your targets set up on your metal frame both top and bottom where you want the gusset to go and then just mark out with a pencil what the angle is and now you have a template which you can cut out and transfer to your metal and that way you know your piece is going to fit perfect and you really don't care what angle it is it's a nice way to solve the problem if you don't have cad i'm using this silver streak pencil the torch doesn't melt it away and you can really see what you're doing marx's all silver streak welders pencil since i have the torch out to do all the coping i decided to cut the hole for the i-beam or wide flange to slip through this location was determined by my cad model so this is by far the hardest component of this whole assembly you can probably do this with a skinny wheel i don't recommend it the torch or plasma cutter is going to be your best bet got everything all welded out looking great got the hole cut for the i-beam now i need to transfer this hole to this front face so that dynamic jaw can slide through the second hole for the wide flange beam is the most critical it determines the direction of the beam think of these two holes like gun sights on a rifle if the hole is put in the wrong location it could cause the slide to go up down left or right that could hurt me later when i go to install the screw assembly so all i'm going to do is just use a combination square and transfer these lines around to the front and that's going to get me pretty close so no need to be exact with this we will adjust that later i'm cutting the whole oversized about a quarter of an inch this is going to allow me to get the alignment of the beam perfect a little bit later on if you cut the hole too tight and get the tolerances too close together you're probably going to fight getting that i-beam to slide through this turned out pretty good but it's pretty hot so while it's cooling down let's work on the dynamic jaw part of the vise i'm going to be repurposing a w6 by 15 wide flange beam that's six inches tall and weighs 15 pounds per foot another reason why you guys should make these holes bigger than necessary is because well if you take a look at this i-beam or w beam let's measure flange to flange and it comes out as five and seven eighths of an inch this is supposed to be a six inch beam if we go to the other side it's six and an eight so our i-beam is squished or our two flanges are not parallel with each other and that's totally fine that's acceptable that's just what i-beams are but we need to be building accordingly to the material and don't assume that this is perfect so that's why all the clearances are loose and we'll adjust for those right now so in mr logan's design i can see a piece of angle iron acting like a little table or shelf on the bottom so we're gonna put that in next so i'm building supports all the way around this i-beam the back i'm gonna match the angle with this piece of plate we're gonna stick it in the press basically capture this i-beam not too tight but just right so the back part of the jaw is probably one of the most critical areas this is going to want to be lifting up when you clamp so i'm thinking i'm going to use a piece of round rod i cannot see in the picture what this looks like so i'm going to assume that he did something like this so i'm going to weld this piece of round stock hopefully that'll help that slide when it's under pressure [Music] this is exactly the way i thought this thing would sound so i have a bottom shelf for the i-beam to slide on mr logan in his photograph has the top piece of angle iron like this is that for a reason maybe my first indication were to put it like this he has a reason he put it like this i want to follow his drawing as closely as possible so i'm probably going to put it like this well i'm going to do the same thing right here i cannot see any indication how he solves this problem but i'm going to assume it's probably the same way so let's get those pieces cut and installed check out these fireball clamps as you can see has a really long reach on one side and a short reach on the other when comparing to a standard clamp they're both equal on both sides which could be a problem they're trying to clamp inside a tight area like this can't get in there so the fireball gives you that option short or long and in this situation it's perfect because i can reach over the deep flange and reach in to the small hole that's about as best as you're gonna get with a warped i-beam it's now time to get the dynamic jaw welded to that wide flange i'm using another piece of 8 inch channel iron and setting up some stops and some magnetic 123 blocks to get the alignment perfect with the static jaw that has already been welded once that's in place i basically just tacked everything together to make sure it runs smooth so it's now time to get the jaws welded to the static jaw and the dynamic jaw and it looks like mr logan just used a piece of that eight inch channel iron by his picture it looks like he has the sticking out a little bit but not all the way so what we're gonna have to do is make a cope in here to slip over existing so we're going to slot that weld it on and we might make some nice 45 something fancy that's what the picture looks like anyway so let's replicate that i'm looking to match both jaws together so i've clamped them that way i can mirror all the features and make them look identical this is my favorite part about metalworking sculpting something so it looks good to your eye nothing can really be wrong here as long as it looks good it's right probably wondering what i'm using my new scraper this is for welding tables chipping hammer it removes bb's slag spatter and the design is pretty simple it's got a stainless steel weighted handle it's got a tool steel cutting edge this also clears out the holes or the chamfer inside the welding table it's a nozzle cleaner you can use it forward or backwards it's got a replaceable blade on it and it works really dang good it's now time to add some structural plate steel to strengthen this dynamic jaw looks like in the photo there's a stiffener plate or a back plate to basically turn this channel into a piece of tubing so i really don't know why we just didn't use a piece of tube to begin with but we're just following the photo so let's get this plate on welded in place and then we can work on the screw so let's get that done it looks like mr logan placed this plate steel inside the legs of the channel so that requires cutting down some plate steel to get a custom size and then putting a nice break shape on the end to give the curvature of the top jaw it also needed a coat to get it to fit just right i plan on coming back and stitching this on permanently and not do any solid welds because that could warp the whole assembly so stitch welding and tacking mr logan's vice has this two by two piece of angle iron welded to the front of the vise to keep it from tipping over and he has these really big radiuses that you could see in the picture that are cut out so what's the fastest way to remove all this material well i think we're going to use the go-kart grinder to do that and i'd like to see how fast i can hog away this quarter inch thick piece of material on the corner here so let's time it and see how fast we can do it three two one 100 miles per hour here we go i'm using a ceramic 40 grit belt at a surface feet per minute of 9000 or pretty close to 103 miles per hour if you'd like to know more about this machine and how i made it i have a four part build series which i think you guys will find pretty interesting that's moving some metal one more side and we'll get this thing welded on i'm gonna lift him up almost getting to the point where i can't lift it anymore it's now time to work on the screw assembly to get this thing moving under its own power as far as i can tell about the screw in the photo it looks like there's a nut welded approximately here which i think we can do the diameter of the screw hard to tell so i'm going to use this one inch five acme thread i'm gonna have to torch or drill some holes for this to go through possibly put a sleeve or a bushing in here because this is now doubled wall tubing find the corresponding spot on the opposite side torch the hole in here and then stick it out the back on the other side for video sake i think it's nicer to see what would happen if you didn't have pre-planning or a cad drawing so let's drill some holes in all this stuff and hopefully it all works out so i can easily drill a one inch hole on this side of the arm and the other and slip this screw right through here but what's gonna happen is when i start turning that handle and i start pushing on this it's gonna wanna squish these two pieces of material together and not actually transfer the force into the jaws so that's what this bushing that i just made on the lathe is going to do is not allow these two pieces to squish but we can't tell that that's in the picture or not i'm going to assume it's there you're probably used to seeing this style of hole saw which uses a bi-metal teeth this is the carbide virtually cut anything with this they're way more expensive but they're a lot nicer to use this is what i'm going to use to drill through each piece of material these will easily drill up to one inch thick plate because of their depth carbide teeth just like on a machinist tool or a table saw blade so they cut pretty nice and they're really nice to have if you do a lot of metal working and you're not confident cutting a circular hole with a torch so let's use this we're gonna chuck it into the drill and off we go okay i'm gonna cheat i've shown you guys you can drill the hole with the hand drill so let's go over to the radial drill and drill this it's gonna be much faster doing it that way i'm using the radio drill because it's designed for this exact purpose weldments or things that have already been assembled that need holds drilled in them has a big table the head can move over to the side and you can punch or drill holes or even drill and tap this radial drill is a baby with its three foot arm some of these drills have arms up to 12 15 feet long mr logan's design with everything welded doesn't give you any room for error everything has to be perfectly concentric and true and straight if it was me in my design i would have made the nut a floating nut if your screw is a little bit bent or the holes aren't quite aligned right could take up the variances in the components it looks like in the photo mr logan added a protector or a shield for the screw that hangs out the back and i'm just using a piece of dom tubing to make it match his picture i'm guessing if a log or something rolls off the back of the vise this piece of tubing should protect that i got the jaws on got everything welded all blended and it looks just like the picture but there's something that i noticed when i installed everything together and i was worried about this when i saw the photo this is its max opening basically teeter-totters on that front foot you imagine putting something heavy in here like a log and trying to pound it's just not balanced probably had it bolted down in the back i'm gonna take inspiration from this hand truck and add a piece of plate steel much like the hand truck has to the front this is going to allow us to stand on it it's not going to get in our way we can bevel the edges and not trip over it so let's get that done and solved unfortunately this is where i deviate from mr logan's plans but it's kind of necessary to make this device usable so this is what i came up with this piece of 3 16 plate steel to help keep it stable but what i'm finding out is i tried it really long too springy still kind of wants to bounce around a little bit short seems like it's a good compromise between rigidity and tipping you're probably going to say jason just weld some legs out here rigid pieces and i would agree that would fix the problem but then you're going to be stubbing your foot into it kind of like these are sticking out these are tripping hazards so trying to remove as many tripping hazards as possible yeah i could put a big huge one-inch piece of plate steel back here i could also put 400 pounds of counterbalance on the back of this thing to get it to stay in place too but the art of this design is how do you get it rigid enough and stable enough and reduce the tripping hazards so i'm going to put this little shark fin in here it's going to stiffen up the plate keep it from bending you shouldn't really be touching this with your toes because it's going to be in the center but this is the best solution i can come up with it looks good and functions adequately it's now time to work on the hand wheel when i look at the original logan vice it looks like a cast wheel with some s curved spokes we're gonna have to make one i need to create a ring for your hand approximately 12 inches in diameter then come up with some way to make the s-curved spokes and then a hub to attach to the screw so i would like to make the wheel out of this one inch thick piece of plate steel i have enough space on here to cut one huge continuous ring probably around 12 inches in diameter and i'm gonna do it by using this a torch attachment i have two different torch styles here one is a designated cutting torch but my torch attachment doesn't fit my torch this end slips over the cutting nozzle and then this side kind of wedges there but as you can see it hits my trigger of my cutting torch so this thing does not fit so i'm going to have to switch to this cutting torch this is a combination torch and this cutting attachment just clicks right on just like that this attachment has a point this will sit into a center punch from this distance to the nozzle is going to be our radii or the radius of our circle and we can set that anywhere with this little knob cut small circles big circles arches and then we lock it down so let me show you how we use it and we'll slice some parts out with it i'm going to set this point and just the outside of that kerf to six inches and that's the beauty is i can make it whatever i want so even if i'm off i'm right so the order goes we cut the outside and then we do the inside because if we do the inside this hole drops out and then we lose our center the goal for me for these popular mechanics builds is to show you different solutions to the problem i could easily have cut this ring out with a water jet but the torch works just as good with a cutting torch and a turntable you can make just about anything you can make a turntable with a wheel caster and a piece of plate steel and this cutting torch attachment is like 75 not that expensive at all the wheel's looking great but it's not profiled to fit my hand so i want to use the grinder and profile it like this this is turning out pretty good with the grinder but nobody wants to watch grinding i don't want to discourage you guys from making wheels with simple hand tools but i do have a lathe here so i'm going to use that to make the contour and bevel the edges so let's take this to the lathe and make this look really nice knowing that i was going to use the lathe i made the blank a little bit oversized so i could cut off all that dross and make the wheel round and to size instead of giving all the corners a fillet i'm choosing to do a chamfer the chamfer is going to make it look like a cast draft angle and that's kind of the look i'm going for yes i'm using an orbital wood sander on steel and it works pretty good for removing burrs putting a nice finish on it and blending any rough edges so let's work on getting some spokes installed so here's my inspiration for making these cool s spokes this is a half inch diameter hot rolled steel bar and i'm just gonna be bending them between two posts and kind of a shape that i think that looks good we really don't have any fancy measurements to go off of we're just gonna make five identical parts i'm just gonna use this little extension bar and just bend it into shape you can't be wrong even if they're not identical it's gonna give it that hand made feel and then i just match up to my little template here now let's flip it around and do the other side and you can make this look like anything you want and then what we look at is part of the section here's the one i bent earlier one looks pretty close make a mark and we cut the tails off and the band saw that's looking cool we'll have to adjust the lengths once we get their hub made so all i need now is a center hub that's going to attach to the screw and hold the spokes i'm using two and a half solid bar stock with a one inch through hole the hole just needs to fit whatever diameter screw you decide to use i need a really simple weld fixture to get the spokes just in the right place i gotta get this hub in the center of the square so i'm using the pin and once i know that's perfect then i can use the flat edges of the plate to center the ring then i can use some fireball shims to elevate the spoke in the center of the wheel and then i just use my calibrated eyeball to position the spokes where i think it looks good look at how cool this wheels turned out i like that even though every one of those spokes are completely different and hand bent you cannot tell that they're not i don't know perfect but we're missing one more component and that is a speed handle and i'm going to use this one off the shelf because i like the shape i think it fits the curvature and then you can easily make one of these everything down to the simplest to form to where the piece of dom tubing slipped over a bolt or a socket headed cap screw but in order to fasten this to the wheel we're gonna have to drill and tap into the face to get this mounted so let's go do that next i wanted this handle to look like it was growing right out of the end of the spoke so i saved its positioning for the very last thing so let's talk a little bit on how i want to get this wheel attached to this acme thread the simplest way to do it is just to weld it to the hub just something like that we could weld it plug weld it grind it smooth you'd never know i'm not a real big fan of welding something into place that could wear out over time so my idea is to take the acme nut thread it onto the end of the shaft and then what we'll do is we'll cross pin it i will drill through the nut and into the shaft and we'll use a roll pin and that way it's secured and then i will weld or tack weld the nut to the hub and that way you could get a wrench on here if you wanted to or replace the thread at any time just in case you guys want to build your own vise but don't want to build your own hand wheel i recommend this one it's cast iron it's chrome plated it's heavy it looks good has the speed handle on it has the correct size board that you need i'll leave a link in the description below where you guys can find it but for my hand wheel i want an oil rubbed bronze look so first thing you need to do is get the wheel up to temperature super hot and then rub some linseed oil and wax on it it'll give it this cool oil rubbed bronze look now the only thing left to do is paint it get it cleaned up and then we can put it onto the probe see how powerful it is and see where the weak spot is then maybe we can compare it to the big floor vise here in the shop so let's test it out [Music] so what do you guys think got our oil rubbed bronze wheel we got this thing all painted red it's looking kind of classy i didn't know what color to paint it because obviously the photo is black and white i'm just kind of a red guy as you can tell about all the other things i make how does it feel it feels pretty good i had to grind off some paint where it was causing some binding issues the wheel feels about right in diameter as i'm standing here i can reach the top of the hand wheel at any point and open the vise if the handle is hanging down look how far i'd have to reach to grab it i'm literally bent all the way over and then you're doing this rowing motion to get it to go and then you let go the handle falls and then you gotta reach for it again but the wheel is much nicer you can reach it while standing the speed handle is definitely necessary another thing i noticed is don't expect this thing to be a precision instrument the jaws are curved because this is just plate steel don't expect this two big surfaces to match perfectly we're basically just holding wood here so i really don't think it matters before we put a log in here i'd like to address some problems that i can see and that i kind of anticipated for one when we get this thing all the way out it is still very tipsy and two i think this thing has to be bolted down it wants to move around on you this thing only weighs like 300 pounds so it's really easy to pivot or move i can see this being a problem if you're trying to chisel or hammer on something it just does not have the mass to be able to hold your work securely so i'm thinking mr logan had this bolted town in the back that's probably why he didn't need this front foot compared to the big gigantic blacksmith vice this sucker is basically unmovable and everybody made fun of me for making it too heavy and why do you need a vice this big this is an unmovable object and i like to move the furniture around so i don't want to bolt things to the floor you're going to have to add another thousand pounds to this thing to get it to be usable without bolting it but enough talking blah blah blah let's put something in the jaws and see how it clamps let's clamp this rotten log to see how well it holds oh it's pretty good okay maybe not let's try this again i think i was right on a knot boy this thing just bounces around all over the place okay i hear some wood cracking i think it's adequate clamping force what i think should be an appropriate clamping force is probably somewhere between the two to four thousand pound clamping force range for wood so i used a five threads per inch screw this is a great thread pitch for speed versus clamping force you start going too fine it's going to take you forever to move the jaw start going too coarse you're going to lose a lot of force so the 5 i think is a really good balance of the two i'm using my test probe here i'm gonna just try with the jaws closed at first see if we can't bend it well there's a thousand fifteen hundred twenty two hundred pounds let's see if it still operates yes i'm just going to go to where i feel comfortable let's try it one more time and remember this is approximately almost 14 inches pretty decent size opening 1600 3000 that's exactly what i was expecting from this thing for woodworking this is perfectly adequate i don't think you'd want any more than that yeah my biggest complaint is that woodworking you're probably going to get this screw all gummed up with sawdust so i don't know if that's a really good idea i can see that being a potential problem things that i like about it how compact from the dynamic jaw to the end of the wheel where if you look at my vise the blacksmith vise you have quite a far distance away but when you compare these two machines they are not even in the same ballpark this thing is so smooth so powerful it is on a totally different playing field with the thrust bearings in the screw that is so much smoother you could add them to this one but i'm assuming that mr logan did not but it is an upgrade but i think if you start increasing the pressure you're gonna start bending something so it's probably not a good idea to add that that was pretty fun to see mr logan's vice jump off the pages and become a reality and be able to build something like this right here in my machine shop i learned a lot of things along the way and hopefully you guys did too if you would like to build your own logan vice i'm going to leave the plans down below linked to the fireball tool website so you can build this yourself but overall this was fun i hope you guys enjoyed this thank you for watching and i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Fireball Tool

Views: 1,747,288

Keywords: fireball, tool, Fireball tool, Welding, Popular Mechanics, Logan Vise, Pete Logan Carnival Shop, 1957, Shop Shims, Cutting Torch, Pencil Calculator, Disneyland, Electric Car, Pacemaker, I Beam, C Channel, Marvel Bandsaw, TIG Weld, Radial Drill, Milling Machine, Hwacheon, Lathe, Custom Wheel, Vintage Vise, Vise Build, Strange Vise, DIY Vise, Screw, Monty Python

Id: 8klF0ZYouPs

Length: 31min 10sec (1870 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 29 2022