Vise Stop! Let's Make One!

you're waiting for that to fall off aren't you hello internet my name is quinn and this is blondiax today i'm going to make a tool that every machinist wishes they had sooner or later and that's a vice stop this is a very simple project great for beginners but that's also an opportunity a simple project like this is a great chance to try out some new things stretch your legs try new material new skill whatever this being blondie hacks i'm going to add so many new and experimental things to this such as to nearly guarantee failure but that's how we learn so let's go okay but before all this what's a vice stop and what's it for well machining vices are very repeatable in the y-axis but of course there's nothing to repeat in the x-axis you can shift the part around anywhere you want normally that's fine but if you want to take this part out and put it back again and you don't want to lose the features that you've located say on your dro or your hand wheels or if you have multiple parts that are all the same and you want to do a similar feature on each one then a vice stop will allow you to repeat the x location of those parts while the fixed jaw continues to allow you to repeat the y position a quick and dirty option is a magnetic indicator stand you can put one of these down turn on the magnet and that will give you a pretty decent approximation of a vise stop that's pretty repeatable as long as you're kind of gentle with it because you're relying on the magnet and you know nothing moving here this setup also takes up a fair amount of room you've got this indicator stand sticking up here which might be in the way of the quill and it's taking up table space here so if you're working near the end of your table you might not be able to use this and so on so there's lots of reasons why we might want a more compact vise stop that can exist within the work envelope a common trick you'll see is people drill and tap the end of one vice jaw and then put a little plate on there that can swing in and out of position and that gives you a nice stop on the end of your vise jaw and that's useful for a great many things however it doesn't allow you to set up a stop anywhere else in the vice jaw and a lot of vise jaws are hardened so you may not have the option to drill and tap that a vice stop is not just for repeating parts it's also for repeating fixtures so a very common operation that you'll see is people using a call-up block and a vise like this because it allows you to very easily index 90 degrees or 60 degrees depending on the shape of your call it block now this all assumes however that you're getting the call-up block in the same position in the x-axis sure the call block allows you to index around the x-axis and again the fixed jaw is repeating on the y-axis but if you're not repeating in this way then you're going to mess up your part if you're making say a square section on the end of a shaft then the sides of the square are going to be different depths as you rotate this around so once again a vise stop allows you to repeat the front edge of the collet block and allow you to very quickly do an operation like this here's my little design for a vise stop so the rod there moves laterally and it's got spherical ends on it and then the whole thing clips to the vise with a set screw on the back and then the larger counter board screw there is to clamp the rod in place to the junk pile now to see what i've got to make this out of i've got some 4140 that's tempting but look at this i've got some 303 stainless here that was donated by a viewer recently so i think i'll give that a shot for that we're going to bust out the anchor lube it's supposed to be the thing for stainless so let's give this a shot so i'm going to mark it to length and cut myself off a chunk here i've never made anything with stainless before so this is going to be a little bit of an adventure so i'm going to set it up in the mill and i'm going to square it up okay get some machinist toothpaste on there and give this a shot i'm only gonna be machining four of the six sides of this stock because the nominal dimension of the stock in one axis is actually the same as i want for my final part and the thing doesn't have to be machined all the way around so i'm going to leave it rough and i'll just clean it up later on the buffing wheel see how those first cuts ever on stainless came out and finish is nice i've got a little bit of a step there i'm not sure where that's coming from but i'll flip the part over do the other side and i'm going to bring it to dimension on this axis now of course because i'm not machining the two sides that are currently on the vise jaws this is not of course the proper method for squaring up stock but this is again not a super precision part and this is going to be just fine i experimented with depth of cut as i went along and i can definitely feel the toughness of the stainless here i can't do as deep a cut as i would with mild steel i have this convenient vibration sensor on my mill in the form of a block of wood on the sheet metal you're waiting for that to fall off aren't you i know you're waiting for it oh the cuts finished oh it didn't fall off okay here are you not entertained and i'll check and see how much i have left to remove by using a depth mic down to the parallel this is not the most precise way to do this because you are assuming a lot about how the part is sitting on the parallel but it's going to be close enough for this part and i got a little more to go so i'll do a finishing pass on this edge okay so far so good i'll clean up my toys here and let's pull that out of there and give it a quick deburr and i'll measure it and see how we did dimensionally and this will give us a sense of how accurate that micrometer method is and you can see that i'm aiming for 750 and i'm about two thou over but i'm the same at both ends so at least there's no taper but you can see how that micrometer to the parallel method is a little prone to error i'll move it to the end now and side mill the end square you don't ever want to do a heavy operation with the part at one end device like this because it's not held as securely as it would be in the center because the vice jaws can get a little crooked that finish is nice so now i can flip it around and clean up the other end and bring it to length and i'm just using my scale here to check and make sure that when the part is at final length i won't be hitting the vice with the end mill got a little ways to go here so i'm doing multiple passes and again because i'm clamped on the end of the vice i don't want to get too aggressive with the cuts here so i just did a lot of light passes okay that should be it the gesso meters will be sufficient precision here on this part so i'll check my dimension there and we are one thou over which that is going to do fine so now i can deburr all the edges i'm using this little noga blade tool here which i like very much for deburring parts does a really nice job there's a link to this tool down below the next thing i'm going to do is the hardest feature on the part and i'm going to do it now in case i screw it up i haven't gotten very far into the part here if i scrap it now it's always a good idea to design for manufacture when you're designing things so here's a great example of how not to do that i need to make this feature here and it's basically three concentric holes of different diameters it's threaded 632 here and then it's 632 clearance here and then counter board for the head of a 632 cap screw this detail here is especially tricky because the split line has to land right on the transition between the threaded area and the clearance area and of course drills have a point on them so the base of the drill point the widest part has to land right on that split line for this to work and we need to stop 20 short of the far side of the part so we have a very deep hole a very small diameter in stainless mind you with very little margin for error at the end this is going to be difficult but quinn you said this was a beginner project well if you want to do this easier just drill this straight through and it'll be much much simpler i just wanted to have the nice clean front on the tool or you could have the clamping bolt come in from the front which would probably make all this a lot easier but again i wanted a clean look and i'm trying to stretch my skills here so i've got it set up vertically in the vise and i need to make sure it's very vertical so i'm indicating it in here and i've got a piece of copper bar there that i'm using to reach in there and tap it straight i need to be pretty straight here because it's a very long hole so if it's even a little bit crooked it's going to be pretty far off by the time we get to the other end so now we are within a couple of tenths there of perfectly vertical i think that is going to be sufficient now i'm going to edge find to get the center on the x-axis and then i'm going to edge find the near edge to get the position of the holes that we need to make here in the y-axis and i'm dialing in 350 on the y and this little jiggling back and forth you see is me trying to get it to land on the right numbers with the table locks all set because i want both table locks fully locked for all of the things that we're about to do i'll start by center drilling here and the rule of thumb with drilling and stainless is don't linger get in do your business get out if you linger at all and the drill rubs the stainless will instantly work harden and then your toast i'm going to take this moment to reinstall the depth stop on my quill i don't leave it installed because it takes up valuable space there in the work area but it is going to be very useful here so i'm going to start with the tapping drill size for 632 for the thread that's at the very bottom of the hole so i'm just going to lightly touch the work zero that dro on the quill and then set my depth and check on the side here of the part to see how we're doing it's a little too deep so i moved it up a little bit again we want to come just shy of breaking through that far surface and then get lots and lots of toothpaste on there and here goes nothing again this is a very high aspect ratio hole so it's going to want to pack up with chips and when drills pack up with chips that's when they start rubbing and then that's going to work hard and that's stainless and if it work hardens we're done this part's scrap so it's all about getting in get some depth as soon as you feel those chips starting to pack up get out clear the chips get back in again get in do your business get out okay that worked pretty well i think so i'm just double checking my depth here with the drill off and we got to where we needed to be so that's good now i need to widen out the upper part of the hole for the clearance so i'm using a 20 feeler gauge to zero my quill dro and then i can just add 20th out to my depth and we should end up in the right place this hole is much easier to drill because we're just opening up an existing hole so not too much risk of work hardening the stainless there out with the jacobs chuck and in with an end mill now to make the counter bore bring the head down nice and close you always want the head close to the work and locked and then i'm going to go in and do that counter bore this was a very easy operation this is a nice sharp carbide end mill but chip control was a bit of an issue so i had to stop periodically and clear the rat's nest out of there but this counter bore seemed to go very well these are all new operations for me in stainless so i didn't know how some of this was going to go what's that compressed air in the blindy hacks shop i know i don't usually use it i do have a small compressor though and i busted it out of storage just for this job because it's really important to get the chips out of that very deep hole that i'm about to thread the number one thing that causes taps to jam up and break is chips jamming up in there so i want to really make sure that there's no chips in there now you saw me go in with the taper tap and it bottomed out immediately because this hole is so shallow at the bottom so i had to go back in with the bottoming tap the blind hole at the bottom only has about three threads in it the basically the minimum i could get away with so uh we don't have a lot of wiggle room there but blowing out the chips again and going back in will often buy you an extra thread in this case it did so do a little test fit here with the bolts and that looks good it's threading in now this bolt is too long so it's not going to thread all the way down but the threads are down there and they seem to well exist okay now i can center drill and set up to drill the 632 set screw that's going to clamp this thing to the vise jaw and this part is much easier because we just have to drill sufficiently deep to get into where the cutout area in the middle will be and that is all looking very good so i'm going to turn it sideways now edge find again and center drill and now we're going to drill the through hole for the sliding bar and again get in do your business get out get into your business get out drilling stainless is one of the most challenging things according to real machinists and i can see why so i drilled that under size and now i'm going to come in with my 3 16 reamer and i'm going to just ream this to final dimension this seems to be going just fine lots of toothpaste again debur that hole i'm going to leave that set up in the middle now just like it is and i'm going to go make the bar now so that we can fit the two together if need be so mark that for length and i'm going to build some character and use the hacksaw for this over to the lathe now and i'm going to face off the ends of that bar get them nice and square and clean and i'm going to break the corner with a file just to make sure there's no burr on there but i'm not going to chamfer it because i need that surface to be nice and flat with no rounded edge on it here as we'll see and then i check the length and flip it around and face it down to the final length that we need and now we can do a test fit in the hole and it doesn't quite go in it's very close but not quite so measuring the bar here and we can see that it is half a thou over 3 16 which is typical for the drill rod that you buy which is good that means our reamer actually cut right on size so i've got the over under reamer set here i'm going to grab the oversized one and as you can see it's clearly one thou oversized and i'm just going to open this hole up one thousand and you would swear that nothing happened when you do this but now check that out mercy that's a perfect fit oh that's an rc3 all day maybe even rc2 over under reamers are the secret to looking like a hero in a hobby shop dee birdy birdie burr this tool by the way is part of the same set that the blade tool i showed earlier is in so check out the link down in the description below okay we're ready to cut the slot down the center of the part now so i got it set up on the wide side and i'm just double checking make sure i've got enough sticking up that i'm not going to hit the vice jaw that looks good and i'll edge find on that edge once more and bring my end mill into the middle of my slot when you're slot cutting you always want to do the middle part first and then work your way out for a good finish and ooh that is squealing like crazy i don't like that at all so i slowed down the rpm and came back in and that sounds much much better i think if the rpm was too high that front edge of the cut is worth hardening if you look in the big book the surface speed for stainless is always a little lower than mild steel and i think this is why so i worked my way down to final depth in the center of the slot in multiple passes i think i did 40 thou each pass which is less than i would do on mild steel but that seemed to be where the stainless was happy and then i deburr that and check my final depth that's looking good so now i want to see how much i have to take off of this side and so i'm just side milling now to remove the extra on that side and then once that width is good then i go back and i do the same on the other side so you notice that i'm cutting back to front on one side and front to back on the other so that we are always conventional milling and never climb milling next i'm going to make this a high value part by chamfering everything with this two flute chamfering mill it's a very nice little piece of kit chamfering everything will just make it nicer to handle and it'll look nicer and yeah chamfers just make the world a better place the exact dimension of these chamfers doesn't matter so i'm just touching off with the tool and then moving on the x the same amount each time and as long as you don't move the tool vertically then all of the chamfers will come out looking the same that's looking pretty good a little deburring to do but here's a little test fit now and that fit on there is really nice there's a 10 thou clearance on that so it slides really nicely now a little mechanical design lesson here this corner here should actually be relieved because any inside corner always has a tiny tiny fillet in it might be so small that you can't see it but that little fillet will keep an inside corner from seating on a square outside corner now a typical way to get around this is to just cut a slit in there with something like a slitting saw as i've shown here in the model now the back corner doesn't need that because that corner of the vise is chamfered but i'm not going to bother doing that because this isn't a high precision part it doesn't need to seat perfectly on the vise jaw down to the micron but if you look at precision fixtures like v blocks you'll always see that relief cut in the bottom and that's why next thing to do is set up a little slitting saw here and i'm going to cut the slit in the hole that holds the bar so that it will clamp on the bar so i squared up the part and i need to know how thick my saw is so i can get it centered on the hole and it looks good now here's the problem with slitting saws at least on this arbor that i have and there's never clearance above the vise for it so you always end up needing to reset the part on the end of the vise as i've done here and now i'm measuring up some packing to put in the far end of the vise because this is going to be a pretty heavy cut and so i don't want the vice jaw to be candid in this case so my packing is a couple thou smaller than the part so that the part is sure to be clamped tighter that's important and then to find the top of the part i'm using a feeler gauge you can also touch off with a slitting saw but i don't want to mar up the top surface here so i'm using a feeler and then i add 10 thou plus the distance that i want plus half the thickness of the slitting saw and that will be right on the center line of my hole a little sandy to check and that looks good and at the last second i remembered actually it's this side that needs to have the slit in it that was a close one and then i touch off with the saw and then set up to make the cut a little toothpaste on there recently a real machinist told me that you always want to do a full depth cut in one pass with a slitting sock because that gets the most possible teeth engaged because these saws always have run out in them so if you do a light cut you're only getting one or two teeth and these saws are also designed to clear their chips in a deep slot like this so they really do perform best if you do it in one pass and that's honestly kind of terrifying especially on a small mill like this but it really does work and it's some of the best advice i ever got for slitting saws so that operation went really well i wasn't sure how it was going to go again this is stainless it's all new to me but it went perfectly and now we can test that clamping action on the bar to see if it's going to work so i've got washers in there so that the bolt head has something to clamp against and that looks like it's going to work the clamping action is working there so we did get enough threads at the bottom of that deep blind hole and the washers will help me figure out how long this bolt needs to be so i ground this down to length using the thickness of the washers and the depth of the counter bore and that threads in there nicely let's see if it actually clamps on that bar and it does it clamps it feels a little mushy which is weird but yeah i got to clamp it pretty hard and it doesn't feel solid which is strange but it is working so okay yeah that's clamping the bar but after a couple of loosening and tightening cycles it got stuck it wouldn't come out it wouldn't unthread and it was thoroughly wedged in there so did i just scrap this part by getting a bolt stuck in it i said a prayer to metallic or the god of machining and i tried super gluing an allen key in there let it set up nice and strong and it worked it came out boy that was scary and a little bit of heat from the torch separated the wrench and we're back in business so what's happening here well a closer look at the bolt reveals that the threads are shearing off now there's only three threads at the bottom of that hole so we're asking a lot of them and this bolt is just cheap so i went on mcmaster car and i bought some quality bolts and you can see the difference the cheap ones that i bought on amazon are at the top and the good quality mcmaster ones are below and you can just see the difference in quality on those threads and with the mcmaster car bolt in there it's night and day like it feels solid it's nothing's mushy and you can tell that it's clamping solid it's great the last thing i'll do on this part is take it to the scotch brite deburring wheel this is the secret weapon for looking like a hero on machinist youtube so i'm especially going to use it on the top and bottom because as you recall i didn't machine those surfaces so they were rough from the factory and i didn't get all the pitting out but gosh that scotch brite wheel sure does make anyone look like a real machinist now my design calls for spherical ends on the bar so we'll do that next and this is not strictly necessary it's just kind of an extra fancy thing i wanted to try and for this i'm going to use ball bearings and ball bearings are great for precision setup so don't ever throw old ones away because they're perfectly spherical and they're very hard so they will only contact your part in one place and they don't wear out or get pitted because they're hardened so the ball bearing sits in a dish feature on the end of the rod now you could easily make that dish feature with a ball nose end mill but i don't have one so i'm going to get fancy i got a piece of high speed steel and the scrap bin here i'm going to cut the end off of it it's an old center drill and i'm going to go over to the d-bit grinder and i'm going to make a single flute ball nose end mill so i'm splitting the stock here in half and once i've got that split then i can go and make a clearance around the back and then i clearance on the front and then i can grind a radius the same as the diameter of the cutter now i did a video on how to use a d-bit grinder if you want to know exactly what all i'm doing here i'm not going to try to cover that again here and a quick clean up deburr on the stone and that is our single flute ball nose end mill it's not going to win any beauty contests i have a lot to learn about this machine but it is going to work i kind of just ground the corner off the back there because i couldn't get the angle right and the radius doesn't quite line up it didn't blend into the edge the radius is actually a little bit too large but i did a test cut here on a piece of aluminum just to see how it's going to work and it's certainly cutting nice if the finish is good and you can it is going to fit our ball bearing but you can see there how the radius is slightly larger than the ball bearing but that's going to be okay i misconfigured something on the d-bit grinder it's a complicated machine i'm going to make this cut in the lathe these pins are actually too small for my four jaw chuck the jaws bottom out on each other so that's why i'm holding it in a split chunk of aluminum then it's really important to get these parts dialed in really really well because if that dish feature that we're cutting isn't perfectly centered then when the ball bearing is sitting in it it's not going to go through the bore on the clamp part because we only have about a thou of clearance there the ball and the bar are exactly the dimension that they need to be pretty much so really important to get this centered and wow well i guess that ought to do it i'm gonna hold the cutter in my jacob's chuck which is fine because it used to be a center drill unlike you know end mills or taps which you really shouldn't put in jacob's chucks because they're too hard now this is a form tool so i'm trying to feed very very gently it does really want to chatter of course okay that looks okay let's see how the ball fits and yeah it fits about as well as we expected not awesome but uh the tool actually flared the end of the bar a little bit so it doesn't fit through the hole anymore so i'll just clean up that flare with a file and now that fits in there good so now i can clean everything up with acetone because i'm going to try loctite 603 to glue the balls in place loctite 603 has never let me down so i set it up like that between those blocks left it overnight to cure and that didn't work at all it looks like the loctite ran out of the joint before it cured so i'm going to try the same thing but set up vertically this time so the loctite has nowhere to go and that also just didn't work loctite 603 is amazing stuff but it is intended for press fits so it cures in the absence of oxygen still i've had it work in cases like this before but not this time so regular old super glue is my final attempt this cures with moisture from the air and that worked just fine i think that's gonna work and a quick test fit and yeah it doesn't really fit anymore so the super glue must have pushed the ball slightly offline and then the ball broke loose as i pushed it through so i just glued that ball back on and i'll call that a captive bar now those balls may not stay there that super glue is not a great hole on there these polished machined surfaces just don't hold glue but yeah if this doesn't work i'll try something else later i could solder them on or or you could just round the ends of the bars with a form tool something like that i wanted to be fancy and use the ball bearing but that's super not necessary for this now to mount this unit on the vice i'm going to use brass tipped set screws these are really cool things when you don't want to mar up the thing that you're clamping to let's do a little test fit here and that looks really good and they can slide the bar into whatever position we need and yeah that looks good it's going to act as a vise stop i'm pretty happy with that and you can also use it on the side of the jaw on this vice even though it's not fully seated the set screw there still has purchase so that works for parts that are deep in the vise like that and then for call-up blocks you can set it up on the back like that and that repeats very well now it's not perfect if you take a look around the back here you can see that it's actually seating on the closer ring and not the block itself which would have been better there just isn't room back there for it to reach into where the actual surface of the block is but this is still going to work just fine and that is it that's our little vice stop i hope you enjoyed watching this get made i hope you will make some version of this yourself thank you very much for watching throw me some love on patreon if you like what i'm doing here and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 192,173

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, jewlery making, diy, home improvement, resin casting, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, vise, vise stop, milling vise, how to make a vise stop

Id: ACNOq5pOYas

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020