Making A Big 16” Vise from Tube and Plate.

today we make a vice when it comes devices there's three options you can either build you can buy or you can restore it's always cool if you can find a big vise at a yard sale or a swap meet and restore one of them or even if you're lucky to find one in good condition that you can use in your shop or if the other option is you're gonna have to buy one which means go to Amazon's read reviews find a vise that actually works or option number three is build one that's what we're gonna do today is build a vise this is a 924 and a half starett the jaw capacity is eight inches and I found myself running into this maximum capacity often to where my part just does not fit in between here so building a vise that has a larger opening is pretty appealing to me I'd like to keep the price around $200 to build this and the weight around 70 pounds and I want the jobs to be about 5 inches wide this kind of puts this in the same range as all the vices you can buy on Amazon and a pretty good price range if you were to buy a used one I think this is going to be the main structure of the whole vise it's a piece of 3 by 4 tubing quarter inch wall and it's approximately like 21 inches long we're gonna whop it down we're gonna find another tube that fits inside of it and I can already tell I'm gonna have to get rid of this weld seam so I think we should tackle that right now [Music] [Music] if you're wondering how to strip the weld onto this piece of tubing I have a video about it so go check it out we've got the weld ripped out of this three by four piece of tubing yeah I got about 22 23 inches of body this is gonna give me a little bit more flexibility to clamp long pieces in between the jaws unlike my starett here which I'm only limited about eight inches this is our sliding moving jaw moving out of the of the tubing when the jaws come together there's a section of this tube that we're gonna use this kind of like a shelf so by just cutting at a 45 we get a little extra support but I think the next part I want to tackle is the fixed jaw so I'm going to make a piece of plate steel in the shape of a jaw and we're gonna sandwich this body of this tube with it and weld it on [Music] that's how this is gonna work [Music] here's what we got so far I got these plates cut out on the water jet I added these cool little chamfers on the edge of this plate just to add a little bit of style the load is gonna be transferred all the way down into the ground with this design and into the sidewall of the tubing which has the most strength and not on this top surface here I'm not gonna weld on the side here kind of like that clean line if you were to build something like as a home this doesn't have to have all this style you could have a square block for crying out loud it doesn't have to be too fancy got a little bit of movement I might have to come back and add some sort of get or a shim or an adjustment to kind of pull some of this slop out of here but after I get this thing all welded together I'll I'll address that the next step we're gonna do is cut a block and machine two holes on the backside of it and this axis right here is gonna give us room to bolt a soft jaw to it [Music] [Music] I got the vise jaws all finished up here I used a piece of one by two piece of cold-rolled bar and then I attached a one by one aluminum soft jaw to it and then I just fastened the soft jaw to the back with a 5/16 socket head cap screw and I positioned them to where they fit in between these plates here on the vise and - I made it tall enough or wide enough here that I can come back and I can machine it off at a letter later day two when these get damaged and these are going to get beat up they're just going to get destroyed but they're really easy to make and I'd like to have one vise around here that just has these disposable jaws on there that are cheap but before I get this welded on I want to get the lead screw in here so that we can slam the vise close together with the lead screw and then after I get all the tension into the the vise we can tack them up [Music] this is exciting we got all our parts machined and ready to get this screw and vise assembly together in order to keep this dynamic jaw all one piece we need to have an extension tube that can run inside of this and this is what you're seeing right here this inch and three-quarter piece of tube steel I welded two nuts on the end and it goes all the way back through here and it gets welded to this end cap so virtually we're pulling from the end of the vise to this jaw which is pretty neat this is a Prentiss vise and this is a what you typically see this nut is mechanically fastened to the static body of the vise and one design flaw that I don't like about this is you have to split the dynamic jaw to give clearance for it and when you do that you get a potential weakness much like this vise needs some repair and you can tell that it has actually split there's a crack that runs a good eight inches down the middle of this Prentiss vise okay because of this design this is one thing I like about the tube steel vise is that I'm able to keep this dynamic moving jaw all one piece and we're able to do this by basically extending the nut all the way from the back to the front so it's fastened at the back of the body instead of the middle and we just welded this nut to a inch and three-quarter piece of tubing and I plug welded it there's two nuts in there so it should be plenty strong but now we have no split down our moving jaw so this should be really strong I really like this design I think it's going to work really well and this will also allow full extension of the vise jaw let's put this all together you're probably wondering why I didn't use a piece of Acme thread or trapezoidal or buttress thread well for one I wanted to keep the price low and this all thread is super cheap and it's readily available at any time but more than anything I really wanted the eight threads per inch the eight threads per inch is going to give me a really high clamping force with little effort on the handle this nut where the balance point is it's pretty close to Center so when I spin it around there my finger I got some balance and then I want extra load I can put the nut in here spin it around the end okay and then it just fits right here in the vise when we're done I have an idea to build a swivel base for this vise and I think I know where some material is that we can use this is the little drop out of the go-kart belt grinder frame I think this piece will work perfect to be able to cut out the base where that swivel for the vise [Music] [Music] doubled beveled beveled outside this is gonna look hot [Music] [Music] this is the main body ring this is that inch 1/8 plate that we used on the go-kart belt grinder build and there's a bevel on the bottom and a bevel on the top and two bevels on the side it kind of gives it this cool casting look and the two five-eighths holes here on the end for the ears they line up perfectly with a fixture table so if I wanted to bolt this down to a one of these tables I could do that but it works something like this this is the bottom plate and it has the matching bevel to the bottom of this one and it can go like that okay and then we have a matching top plate with a matching bevel in this bevel I think I put it at 50 degrees on the top and it's a 30 degree bevel on the bottom and basically they go together just like that and we use these are the little magic square thumb screws and there we go so now it's just a quarter turn and it swivels okay you get it where you want it then you lock it back down again I was hoping that I wouldn't have to turn it in the lathe but it seems to be working really good just fresh out of the water jet with some light clean up and some deburring I think it turned out pretty cool it looks like a casted part that's gonna add some style to this vise now that I have all the pieces here got them ready to weld this thing out [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the performance of the Vice exceeds all my expectations with just simple parts with tube and plate actually puts my stare at Vice over there to shame it operates really similar to my Curt vice on the milling machine with the thrust bearings added in the front and the back of this dynamic jaw commanded the movement is just so utterly smooth this wants to just continue to go in or out just by itself and having the handle and speed mode I call it where it's halfway a little short three inch handle I'm really able to move the Vice fairly quickly and when I want to really crank down on something I can move it to the the torque mode and really put the beans on it I think now it's a must to add thrust bearings on all the vices it just really improves the feel of the operation of the Vice it's often my projects are too big for the vices I have in here in the shop so the extra capacity that this vice offers is gonna be great I thought I was gonna have to add some way to adjust the slop inside the two tubes but it's actually pretty close when you pull it out it it closes repeatably and there's probably a sixteenth of an inch of movement in there maybe a little bit less the swivel works pretty good just loosen it up a little bit more those tapers and there seemed to really be holding the Vice secure let's test it on the clamping force well the table moves you know you're probably pretty good so I consider that a success the swivel plate seems to be locking pretty good it's definitely heavy 87.9 pounds yeah I over built it I tried to stay under 70 pounds but it just wasn't happening I didn't want to take any shortcuts anywhere but I also don't have anything extra on here that's unnecessary either so I think the weight is appropriate for its size and what it can do if you'd like to build this vise in your own shop or give it a try and have some extra clamping capacity I have some drawings to be able to download on the fire ball tool website there's a link in the description below next time you see this vise we're gonna be testing its build quality and function in a bill buy or restore vise contest so thank you guys for watching and I'll definitely catch you on the next one [Music]

Channel: Fireball Tool

Views: 1,755,838

Keywords: fireball, tool, Fireball tool, Welding, homemade tools, bench vise, diy tools, diy vise, workbench vise, table vice, drill vice, homemade vice, metal vise, diy metal vise, how to make metal vise, welding projects, homemade vise bench, diy vise soft jaws, diy vise for drill press, woodworking vise build, big vise, vise restoration, big vice, vice restoration, vise build, build vice, make a vise, homemade vise

Id: tUJbz9Ih13Y

Length: 19min 15sec (1155 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 08 2019