Making A Swivel Base! 5" Wilton Vise!

hey i'm chris zeph from make everything and this is a beautiful 5-inch wilton vise but it needs a swivel base so today we're going to make one check it out all right so starting out this project i've got this nice piece of three quarter inch plate that i picked up from my local metal supplier now you can see it's got some holes and some cuts already in it this was a off cut that he had so i got it for a better price it's also been sitting outside my shop for a little while so it's definitely uh seen better days but that's all right we're gonna utilize it here and cut it up using the metal circular saw so that we can process it on the plasma table so i broke down the sheet a little bit and then i used this metal circular saw to cut it it did not go super well it was a real pain the blade was dull but eventually i was able to cut it and then run over to the plasma table so if you haven't seen this in any of my videos yet this is a torchmate 4400 it's a really amazing high quality plasma table that i've had just so much fun using and integrating into my workflow this will actually be the first time i'm cutting three quarter inch plate with it so there's a little bit of a learning experience here with just understanding my feed rate um you know all my other different settings in order to wind up with the best cup possible now you can see that little kind of vacuum no nose sticking over the cut that's a lincoln miniflex which is a small fume extractor obviously cutting through three quarter inch plate i'm running the machine pretty hard putting out 80 amps and it's just burning through so much material that it's definitely producing a lot of kind of smoke and vapor so i'm trying to do my best to capture that with the little fume extractor while the cut is happening the shapes i'm cutting here are the base and then a kind of spreader lock and then i'm also cutting a second collar that i'm going to weld onto the base so that i can build up the overall height of the swivel base and give the spreader something to lock up against to keep the vice from moving now i had a little break point where i didn't clean the metal well enough so the torch wasn't able to make contact so i had to get in with the sawzall to cut up one of the little pieces but overall the cut quality on this was pretty good i was really happy with the you know lack of bevel there was you know there was a little bit but there kind of always is especially with three quarter inch plasma on a 80 amp machine but overall everything came out really nice so there's the vice that's like i said a five inch wilton and the base of it is already sort of kind of ready for a swivel base all these wiltons um have this little center hole in it which is a rotation pin um and most of them have the holes so that you can put swivel locks if you decided to make the vice a swivel vise i'm just chipping off some of the dross with this little chisel and then just sort of inspecting the part so that little t-shaped spreader bar is supposed to fit inside the base and be able to rotate since there's a little bit of a bevel from the plasma cut i'm going to have to re-machine it just a little bit which is going to help it rotate inside the actual base and just work that much better i went ahead and measured the hole in the bottom of the vise it's about a half inch and i grabbed a half inch pin and then went over to the milling machine so on the milling machine i'm going to reorganize my vise a little bit and this is something that you may not know about these curt style vises is you can really put those jaws wherever you need to so i have one jaw on the outside of the fixed jaw and the other one on the inside of the movable jaw and that allows me to grab this plate and still have room for my drill bit to pass through i drilled a half inch hole which wound up being slightly undersized and i actually had to smash this pin through the spreader which worked out really well because that's actually what i'm going to use to chuck this up in the lathe to cut this down once i had banged it through it was actually really really square and i was going to throw some weld on it but the friction fit was just so tight i didn't think i needed it and it was just going to be one more thing that i was going to have to cut off so i i didn't do it now over on the lathe i'm going to be trying to make this piece round again you can see from just how out around it looks in this clip that i definitely needed some work now the oxide that builds up when you plasma cut something can be really hard so immediately i was having trouble cutting this i wanted to stabilize it a little bit so i used the center drill to drill a hole in the end of my rod and then i put a live center there just to keep this thing you know a little more rigid i'm using an indexable carbide cutter here and i'm just trying to basically take light cuts because this is what's called an interrupted cut and you can see and you can hear it it's just chattering away um this is definitely not ideal at this point i've already smoked the insert and you know i'm still able to cut so i've just kind of decided the inserts are lost and let me at least keep going until i get this thing as round as i possibly can i don't know that i should be getting rained on in sparks when i'm machining a part like this but hey you know i'm the world's shittiest machinist so it's fine so after i did the kind of outside diameter cut i'm also taking some facing passes on this part because i want it to be slightly thinner than the base itself so that i'm able to have it swivel up against the table and not interfere with it and you can see that nice machine face now i just kind of do a little temporary clamp down and i sort of get an idea of what this whole thing is going to look like now that red thing on the table is a rotary grinder so it's actually made for a rotary table so that you could grind in parts uh that around or you could grind a perfect chamfer on the edge of a round part using a surface grinder i picked it up at an auction and i thought it'd be a good kind of tool to use as sort of a welding rotary to weld this perimeter to weld these two parts of the base together so i put a one inch steel plate on it so that i would avoid damaging the surface i turned my machine up as high as it would go and after tacking down that ring i laid in a pretty heavy bead just trying to really make sure that i was penetrating into that steel and bonding these two pieces together forever now you can see i cut in a step when i cut that second ring and that's so that i could build up that transition with weld and then eventually grind it down to make this thing look more like the domed swivel swivel base that's on one of my other wiltons i add a second weld bead there and then i'm able to take this thing outside and do a little bit of grinding i'm sort of just adding weld wherever i feel it's necessary so that i can take it outside and then kind of blend it down i had welded it to that one inch plate which kept it from warping and i had let it cool down before i released it and now you can kind of see the assembly of this the spreader is inside which is going to be locked up against the bottom of that lip which is going to keep the vice from rotating now outside i've got a lot of i've a lot got a lot of grinding to do so i'm going to use the fair victo grain uh you know kind of super grinding discs i've used these a bunch before they aren't a flap disc they're you know an abrasive disc with this special you know engineered abrasive in it and it just eats metal like you can't believe you're able to use super light pressure and grind you know so much longer and so much more effectively than with a flap disc once i got it ground pretty well i brought it back inside and i filled in some of those sections between the mounting locations with some more heavy welds really i'm just trying to get this thing to build up this corner so that once i grind it you can't even tell that it was once two pieces that were welded together the factory wilton swivel base has sort of this domed look which i think is really nice and it complements the curves on the wilton itself so i want to make sure that i replicate that in this process back outside with the victo grain disc you can also notice i'm using a seven inch grinder here which just kind of tears through material that much faster this is a cordless grinder from milwaukee it's definitely big and when you have to use it all day it kind of wears on you but it's so much faster and so much more effective than a four or five inch grinder i think it's worth it you can see as i try to you know weld and blend in these corners that these pieces are basically meshing together and becoming pretty seamless the weld i have on that mounting tab i'm sort of trying to blend in blend down and just make look like this was a cast part i'm using the nose of a flap disc to kind of blend in that corner and just get this thing looking that much closer to finished now back inside i can mock it up throw the vice on there and i can already see the way this is coming together i'm super happy with it now the other thing i'm going to need here is i'm going to need swivel locks for it now i could kind of just go low tech and throw some half inch bolts in there but i want to make something that's custom that really fits this project so i use a locating punch to go through those holes and into the spreader and then i follow it up with a little center punch to mark two locations inside the spreader bar for me to drill and tap i'm also able to cut the pin off at this point which is still friction fit but it's definitely plenty good to just basically sit in the bottom of the vise i go back into the machine shop and on the bridge port i use a center spotting drill to start these holes i chase them up to a larger size and eventually drill the tap hole for a half inch 13 tap now i'm going to be using a tapmatic to tap these holes so if you've watched any of my videos you've probably seen these before but basically a tapmatic is a self-reversing tapping head so once you pull up on the quill the tap reverses and it's basically the fastest way i've ever found to tap holes that now remember this is solid three quarter inch steel plate so i was just able to tap a half 13 tap in just a couple of seconds in one pass without having to reverse my machine so if you do a lot of tapping definitely look into a tatmatic head this model's a 50x and it's honestly paid for itself 100 times over just in doing little jobs and getting me through projects that much faster and more effectively now those holes are drilled and tapped i do just drop some half inch bolts in there just to make sure they work and basically gives me the idea that this thing is going to totally work out once i'm done making the rest of the parts now i want to make sure that these swivel locks go with the shape of the vise so i wanted to design them in a way that they would look kind of factory uh be super functional but nice and heavy duty because this is a pretty big vise so i grabbed some one inch solid steel bar and i'm gonna turn these down into a shouldered swivel lock bolt now i kind of destroyed some of my inserts when i was rounding off that spreader bar so the insert that i'm using isn't great but it'll get me through it i adjust my blade so that i've got a good speed and feed and i'm using the power feed to shoulder down this bolt from one inch to half inch so that i can then thread the outside of it with the half 13 thread that'll match the threads that i put in the spreader bar i'm using the dro that i put on this lathe to make sure that my part is close to the diameter and then i just use a caliper to check it it doesn't have to be super super perfect because i am going to be throwing threads on it but i want it to be close and have a nice surface finish now in order to thread this i'm not going to use a i'm not going to use the lead screw and i'm not going to use my change gears i'm going to be using what's called a geometric die head now geometric die head is something i found out about recently and i picked one up on ebay now this is running in real time right now i'm cutting a half 13 thread using the four chasers inside the die head and then i'm able to stop the motion of the die head and then you're going to see the head open up just like that and i can back it off the threads and boom i've got about an inch and a quarter of half 13 threads in one pass without having to use my change gear to do anything like that and you can see that the half inch threads worked out perfect i tested them with that bolt and they look really really good a geometric die head is something that i've always wanted because threading on the lathe has always just been such a pain you know i always feel like it takes me a bunch of tries and you know having to do multiple threads i just feel like would absolutely take up so much time so after cutting it off on the band so i'm able to just sort of check the way it looks and then i can head over to the lathe and make another one once i finish this one up i just wanted to clean up that shoulder and re-face off the top that i had caught on the bandsaw i could have set up a parting tool here but since i already had my carriage set up and my tool holder set up and referenced off the dro i didn't want to have to reset everything by straightening out my cut off tool so here's just a little sequence of me making the next bolt i have my part in there and my stock you can actually see i pushed it a little bit because my inserts so dull but shouldering it off getting everything chamfered then i grab the geometric dye head and here it is again just eating up those threads super super fast and accurately you can actually set the pressure that the chasers have on the die head too if your threads wind up too big or too small you can adjust them using a little screw i definitely recommend looking into a geometric die head if you ever have to do any threading on the wave i'm just sort of eyeing up these parts to try to make both of them the same size i cut in a little mark which i used as a reference on the bandsaw then i could face everything off the last part to do on these little swivel downs is to drill a hole that goes perpendicular to the threads so that i can put a little handle through some vices will actually have these cut like the head of a bolt and then you can use a wrench but i want this to be a tool-less work so i just want to be able to tighten these up by hand when i need to so this is in a 5c collet block and i'm just kind of drilling through it and then using a little countersink to clean up those holes you can see the way they fit on there and then i tighten them down just with a piece of bar stock now the last thing to do on these is going to be to figure out how to get the handles in them um i'm able to test this and make sure that the vice swivels and everything seems to work really well but i'm going to need little bar handles in there and they're going to need to have some sort of end on them to keep them from falling out i threw a piece of three-quarter inch bar in the lathe and then i just turned down the outside so that i could drill it out for the 3 8 that it's going to need to fit over the little bars that'll go inside the swivel locks so i use the center drill here and then a 3 8 inch drill bit to kind of bore that out the fit doesn't have to be really perfect on these they just basically need to slip over the ends of this bar and basically what i'm making here are just little tiny collars that are going to slip over the end of the 3 8 round bar that's going to go inside the swivel locks and keep them from falling out i turn this down to about a half an inch just so that it's big enough so that it won't be able to slip through the hole and then i'm able to use a cut-off tool to just cut these off into little washers and then i'm going to be attaching them to the 3 8 bar once they're inside the swivel locks and here's a little trick you've probably seen before if you're cutting off parts on the lathe you can throw a piece of bar stock inside your chuck and the tail stock so then as you cut off the parts they don't fall into the abyss you can see my lathe bed's got a ton of chips in it and trying to find something in there it'd be next to impossible i cut off an extra just in case and i could bring these over to the tig welding bench so i stuck a piece of 3 8 bar through there like i said and i clamp these up in a vise and then we're going to take the tig welder and i'm going to weld these little collars to those bars just to make sure that they can never fall out of the swivel locks i line them up and i just kind of pulse the pedal so that i don't weld in too hard and just sort of blend these and merge them with that bar once they're inside i'm really good at dipping my tungsten into the weld once those are done and cooled down i just grind them over on the belt sander and this is just going to give them this really nice machined look what i like about this method versus heating them up and upsetting them with a torch and a hammer is that you get a really nice clean inside edge you know it's going to be nice and square because those pieces were cut on the lathe moving over to the base again i do have to drill four holes now so that this thing can be bolted down to a table when i designed this i designed it with my strong hand table in mind so i made sure that there was a location here that i could space these out and then be able to bolt this thing down to the table i'm going to be drilling half inch holes in all four of those which is just going to help me use half inch bolts to bolt it down now just to kind of finish this thing up there's a couple of spots where i had missed welds or i had a little porosity so i just go through with the mig welder it's turned down a little bit so i'm really just sort of penetrating getting inside those welds and re-welding some of these little spots where there is plasma slag that cut out or anything that might be missing essentially i'm trying to just like use the welder like bondo and it's just going to fill in all the gaps and then once i blend everything it's going to look seamless now to do the finished grinding on this i'm going to use a couple different tools again i'm using the victo grain from faired right here this is on a little two inch die grinder i'm using some more victo grain discs to get those main welds down and then i'm going to switch over to the polyflease discs now these polyfleece discs are a mixture between like a surface conditioning disc and a grinding disc so they give a really beautiful finish and you can get them both in the two inch size and the four and a half a five inch size they do a great job because they don't take away too much material and it really just allows you to finish things up and smooth things over and in this application where you're trying to make something look nice and blended they work fantastic you can see the way it's still able to swivel and everything looks really nice now just time for the final assembly you can see i didn't finish this base that'll be for another video but the way that these little swivel locks look i'm just super happy with the way that the base looks and the way the base blended out i'm also just really proud of i think it came out really great especially considering it's the first time i've cut three quarters on that machine you know it was a lot of welding and a lot of grinding but even just the way the bolts lock into the table once this thing is tightened down and you tighten down those swivel locks even though they're only you know maybe a three or four inch bar you don't get a ton of leverage there's so much surface area from that three-quarter inch thick spreader this thing cannot move this vise is pretty heavy it probably weighs about 65 pounds being it's a 5-inch vise and i think this base really complements it well i'm super happy with how it came out and i can't wait to start using it in the shop all right that about does it for this video i'm super happy with how this came out this has been something that's been rattling around in my head for a while ever since i knew i was getting the torchmate plasma table um the torchmate has been game changing in my shop i know i haven't showed it in too many videos so far i've been kind of learning how to use it and really trying to fine tune my process so i can implement it into my workflow but it has come in super handy over the last couple of months this is the first time i've ever cut three quarter inch plate with it so i have a little bit of tuning to do to get my cuts just that much better but it really did perform incredibly well and zip through that plate way faster than i could have done you know any other way the concept for the base was something that i had worked up on the computer in sketchup and overall i mean it's exactly what i wanted it's perfectly functional it's super heavy duty and it really just makes this vise that much more versatile and being able to space the holes out exactly where i needed them to be so that they would interact with the strong hand table just makes me able to use this massive vise on the table that much easier and if i want i can drill some holes in some of my other tables that match these bolt patterns and put this all over the shop if i want to move it around if you have any questions leave them down in the comments below i'm always happy to answer them if you have any comments about how i could have maybe done things differently obviously i didn't finish the full restoration of this vise i'm going to leave that for another video we're going to do a different finish on it we're going to wind up finishing the base with probably a black patina maybe make some soft jaws and really just kind of make this thing look beautiful and perfect so if you want to see that don't forget to subscribe to my channel also if you want to see behind the scenes stuff what i'm doing in the shop day-to-day follow me right here at make everything shop and don't forget to check out the torchmate 4400 and all the other lincoln electric products thank you to lincoln for uh sponsoring my shop and always providing me with amazing equipment the other thing i want to mention is i use the lincoln paper unit while i was working on this the papr is a powered respirator which essentially is a little backpack with a hose that goes up to a welding hood and the welding hood has a gator in it so that when you're welding and grinding you don't get any fumes back into your lungs it's a really convenient way to weld a little more safely in the shop and grind a little more safely you know the idea here is i want to work and do these kind of things long term and well into my future so the best way to preserve that future is to protect myself now while i'm still young so check out the lincoln paper equipment if you're even considering having a career in metal working or welding invest in safety and invest in your future it is 100 worth it there is no reason not to do it again i'm chris zepp for make everything i really hope you enjoyed this video don't forget to subscribe for more and i hope to see you on the next one thanks

Channel: Make Everything

Views: 15,133

Rating: 4.9595504 out of 5

Keywords: make, maker, vise, wilton vise, vise restoration, wilton vise repair, make a vise swivel base, plasma cnc, torchmate 4400, lincoln electric, strong hand tools, welding, how to weld, pferd, how to grind steel, how to grind inside curves, how to finish steel, lathe, machinist, geometric die head, how to cut threads, how to thread on a lathe, vice, perfect restoration, swivel base, vise mod, antique, bridgeport, tapmatic, how to tap threads, metal shop, 360mp, fabricator, mig welding

Id: O9m0EvNGtYI

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021