USA Mini Self Centering Vise - Development Progress

[mhajicek]

- Vise Jaw redesign for built in dovetail (only necessary to use dovetail if parts need it, jaws have teeth that have very good gripping strength)

Why did you choose 45°? In my experience that leaves the jaws too weak. 60° is far stronger.

 

[Orange Vise]

Hi All:
Those of you who run a 5 axis machine routinely...how often do you hold your blanks by a dovetail?
I ask because if the answer is "mostly" what do you even need the vise for?
If you make a simple wire EDM cut fixture and just always make the dovetails on the stock the same and centered on the stock, why would the vise still be any better than the simple, cheap, rock solid dovetail fixture?

We made some dovetail fixtures by special request for a customer but shelved the project before releasing it to the public.

A dovetail fixture is really just a fixed jaw vise with angled jaw faces and very short throw. We determine that a very small self centering vise costs about the same to make but serves double duty - works as both a vise and a dovetail fixture. In fact, the self centering nature and swappable jaws makes it better for dovetail fixturing than a traditional dovetail fixture itself.

If you're familiar with our Twin-Delta pallet system, imagine that scaled down to 2" x 3" and 1/16" high. It centers the workpiece on all three axes and is mostly failsafe against operator error.

 

[implmex]

Hi again All:
Somebody (is it Lang?) makes or made a squasher gadget to basically cold form the serrations into the stock before it was popped in the vise.
Is that still a thing?...or did it go the way of the Dodo?

Seems to me you could really preserve the precision of the vise mechanism if you didn't need to reef the piss out of it every time you want to grip hard(ish) material and weren't planning to dovetail it.

Any of you every invest in this?
What do you think of it?

Cheers

Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com

 

[implmex]

Hi Orange Vise:
Now that's really interesting...I'd have never guessed that a dovetail fixture consisting of a lump and a socket head capscrew would be as expensive to produce as a whole self centering vise.
I don't dispute what you're saying, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea.

Certainly I built my fixtures in a twentieth or less of the time my partner took to build one of his vises...of course he was not set up for it and everything was hardened and ground to tenths...these things were awfully nice!
But man...they were an Act of Love, and took the requisite time.

You sir, run an efficient setup!

Cheers

Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com

 

[triumph406]

. Whatever you do, don't go to the beijing tool show. It'll make you nervous, real nervous.

Hot women and free flowing alcohol tricking you into making foolish decisions? (sign me up if that's the case)

 

[Stirling]

Everytime I see this little self centering vise stuff come up Wheeliekings old thread where he made vises from solid aluminum bar by drilling and cutting a deep slot to form a hinge and a capscrew closed it to grip the part.

Could do the exact same thing, but with dovetails. I bet it'd work great.

i loce workholding lie that, I do a fair amount of "flexture" type workholding in my 4th axis, it can make for very compact workholding. im also a big fan of mitee bite "dual clamp" wedges used to flex machined features in workholding as the gripers

 

[mhajicek]

Hi again All:
Somebody (is it Lang?) makes or made a squasher gadget to basically cold form the serrations into the stock before it was popped in the vise.
Is that still a thing?...or did it go the way of the Dodo?

Seems to me you could really preserve the precision of the vise mechanism if you didn't need to reef the piss out of it every time you want to grip hard(ish) material and weren't planning to dovetail it.

Any of you every invest in this?
What do you think of it?

Cheers

Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com

Yes, that's Lang. I've been using Lang Makro-Grips for about 8 years, and they're great. I never got the hydraulic imprinting thing; it's several thousand dollars. I'd just dovetail the Titanium instead.

 

[Milland]

design considerations,
it would be nice to have the screw sit below the vice bed, the hump in the middle is a pain when using it as a traditional vice

It's not clear due to the model orientation, but I think the OD of the screw thread is about flush or lower with the vise body. I agree that if it's not, it should be.

It would be nice if the jaws where 0.005" thinner than the vice body for when your gripping the little vice in a larger vice to set it at an angle. (i will skim mine, but nice if i did not have too

You'd probaly want to make a slightly wider "clamp block" that bolts to the base of the vise and use that in the main vise. Given the design of this style of side-slide jaws, it might bind quickly due to deformation as it's tightened in the main vise.

if it was a tiny bit larger one could also ise it with 52mm quickpoint spacing. that would be handy

Once the basic design is dialed-in, making variations should be easy.

 

[boosted]

Hi again All:
Somebody (is it Lang?) makes or made a squasher gadget to basically cold form the serrations into the stock before it was popped in the vise.
Is that still a thing?...or did it go the way of the Dodo?

We had one of the stampers at a previous shop I worked at. It worked pretty well. It uses basically the same system as the vise, so you are essentially just transferring the wear to the really expensive stamper jaws instead of the vise.

The main thing we used the stamper for was production runs. If we pre-stamped a thousand blanks, it made it really hard for the off shift to find a way to load the parts off center in the vise.

In my shop we really just clamp-and-go. Some of the older vises are starting to show wear, but they are still going strong after about 5 years of heavy use, so they have already paid for themselves many times over.

 

[boosted]

Another thought on dovetail prepping.

If we need to really get after some material, a raptor style dovetail is vastly superior to any "regular" dovetail prep. The locating pin in the middle keeps the part from pushing out of the vise sideways when working at 90 degrees. While rare, that is definitely the most frequent point of failure with our Lang workholding, and dovetailing material before clamping in the Lang actually seems to make parts more vulnerable to "sliding", likely because there is less ability to bite into the material.

 

[Fal Grunt]

I got my hands on a couple of the aforementioned vises. Over the last few months, quite a few people have reached out asking if we could make something with a similar form factor.

Not a bad little product. Granted, some specs are a little exaggerated, like hardness. Website said HRC55. We tested closer to HRC25-30 on the jaws.


It's mainly for space constraints on such a small vise. Using side serrations isn't new, and is actually common on robot grippers (take a look at Schunk's PGN+). Grippers often use coarser, trapezoidal serrations, but the gripper bodies are aluminum for weight savings.

A small, steel vise should hold up fine with 60-degree V-thread serrations, especially considering a manual vise will never see the same amount of open/close cycles as an automated vise or gripper.



Yea I think a more appropriate price for a well made, American product in this form factor and style would be $125-150, depending on the type of jaws included. I came to this price point by scaling our existing vises. For example, our 4" x 6" self centering vise is about 5X bigger, so 5X the cost in materials, heat treating, cycle time, consumables, etc, and the 4x6 is priced around $600. Things don't scale down linearly, but they're not that far off.

Several design changes could be made to better suit the intended market, i.e. milling (the original was meant to hold EDM electrodes). This could facilitate more jaw options, mounting options, and length choices.

What does the community say?

I make quite a few parts that are less than one inch wide. Almost everything I do is single piece work flow. These would be killer for nesting and on a rotary. $150 would be wonderful. Having the option for soft jaws, and hard would be appreciated.

Please make the closing dimensions smaller though, when I got my (now discontinued) Delta IV I had to machine the faces of the jaws and the nut to get it to clamp on 1/4" material.

 

[mhajicek]

It's not clear due to the model orientation, but I think the OD of the screw thread is about flush or lower with the vise body. I agree that if it's not, it should be.

On the XD's, the screw is proud of the ways by about a mm.

 

[Milland]

On the XD's, the screw is proud of the ways by about a mm.

Interesting. I get wanting to keep things compact to minimize bending loads, but for a mm I'd put the screw below the bed level.

 

[Orange Vise]

We had one of the stampers at a previous shop I worked at. It worked pretty well. It uses basically the same system as the vise, so you are essentially just transferring the wear to the really expensive stamper jaws instead of the vise.

The main thing we used the stamper for was production runs. If we pre-stamped a thousand blanks, it made it really hard for the off shift to find a way to load the parts off center in the vise.

In my shop we really just clamp-and-go. Some of the older vises are starting to show wear, but they are still going strong after about 5 years of heavy use, so they have already paid for themselves many times over.

How much operator care is required on those stampers? Can an untrained person stamp out a few hundred parts with minimal supervision, or is this something that could potentially require a lot of reworks?

 

[Orange Vise]

Hi Orange Vise:
Now that's really interesting...I'd have never guessed that a dovetail fixture consisting of a lump and a socket head capscrew would be as expensive to produce as a whole self centering vise.
I don't dispute what you're saying, but I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea.

I guess it depends if it has a mounting base. Some don't and need to be paired with a pyramidal base. Ours was integrated and required quite a bit of extra work.

5" diameter at the base for size reference.

 

[crossthread82]

How much operator care is required on those stampers? Can an untrained person stamp out a few hundred parts with minimal supervision, or is this something that could potentially require a lot of reworks?

We have one of the stampers. I'd say its pretty idiot proof once it's setup. You can set the stop so the blanks are loaded in the correct spot, the hydraulic throw is only about .050" so if using rectangular blanks you can't load the wrong side. The stamping depth is determined by the inlet air pressure which you set with a regulator. Just hold the foot pedal down till the needle stops climbing.

 

[DavidScott]

I guess it depends if it has a mounting base. Some don't and need to be paired with a pyramidal base. Ours was integrated and required quite a bit of extra work.

5" diameter at the base for size reference.

View attachment 392324

What finish is that? Is it the same for the vise body in the foreground?

 

[implmex]

Hi again Orange Vise:
I cheated, and just put a lump of hardened and ground 420M stainless with all the bolt holes already in it, up on the wire EDM and went to town... profile, dovetail, spring slot...everything.
Most of it was one pass cutting but I skimmed the dovetail jaws a couple of times and made them nice and dead nuts straight with relieved corners and a nice sproingy clamp wired onto the main vise body as one piece.
I can't remember exactly how long it took, but I got half a dozen finished fixtures in all kinds of sizes in a couple of days
Best part is, they're accurate and most of the time the machine was noodling along unattended.
So all in... 3 hours apiece on average.
Sadly I don't have a picture to show... I don't have them anymore.
They went for a "walk" and I never saw them again.
One day I'll replace them.
Here's something similar I knocked up from a leftover of 316 Stainless:


Cheers

Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com

 

[Stirling]

Hi again Orange Vise:
I cheated, and just put a lump of hardened and ground 420M stainless with all the bolt holes already in it, up on the wire EDM and went to town... profile, dovetail, spring slot...everything.
Most of it was one pass cutting but I skimmed the dovetail jaws a couple of times and made them nice and dead nuts straight with relieved corners and a nice sproingy clamp wired onto the main vise body as one piece.
I can't remember exactly how long it took, but I got half a dozen finished fixtures in all kinds of sizes in a couple of days
Best part is, they're accurate and most of the time the machine was noodling along unattended.
So all in... 3 hours apiece on average.
Sadly I don't have a picture to show... I don't have them anymore.
They went for a "walk" and I never saw them again.
One day I'll replace them.
Here's something similar I knocked up from a leftover of 316 Stainless:
View attachment 392357

Cheers

Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com

Uuuhg. Tools walking away sucks.
I was given a 2” copper “hammer” that had developed a 4” mushroomed end. Great for tapping in things…. Aggressively.
One journeyman to another to another.. Thing was around 80 years old.
The “new guy” got his first pay cheque and my copper hammer……
18 years later and it still burns me.

 

[implmex]

Hi again OrangeVise:
Have you ever explored the idea of offering a 5C collet vise option.
I ask because that partner I was on about in an earlier post, built a very clever one that he seemed to use a lot, and it was pretty simple but also bullet proof.

The "clever" came from the little dovetailed pocket he milled in the end of a collet.
It was triangular as I recall, was a very shallow dovetail angle (maybe 5 degrees??) and would grip the end of a blank with a true death grip while requiring very little height... I think it was something like 0.100".

He particularly liked it because the collet nose is so small... so he could sneak his tool holders in nice and close...much closer than with any other system he tried.
I was always impressed with that solution, but I've never looked for it commercially, so I don't know if anyone out there is making these.

What do you think?

Cheers

Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com