Reed Vise. 4C..

Picked this up in a collection of stuff I bought last year. Yeah, That's a Model A Ford engine in the background and a ruler on the ground. Most of the collection was tractors and stuff which I mostly have sold off, but this was a keeper. Need to make a table or stand for it. Question is which is better? Iron table, or Iron stand?

1 Dandy Dave said:

Picked this up in a collection of stuff I bought last year. Yeah, That's a Model A Ford engine in the background and a ruler on the ground. Most of the collection was tractors and stuff which I mostly have sold off, but this was a keeper. Need to make a table or stand for it. Question is which is better? Iron table, or Iron stand?

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Depends. Portrait painter might not do it the same way as a farrier, steamfitter, SCUBA diver, telemarketer, Rabbi, tuna fisherman, or a proctologist.

IOW ... what sort of WORK do you expect it to help YOU do?

thermite said:

Depends. Portrait painter might not do it the same way as a farrier, steamfitter, SCUBA diver, telemarketer, Rabbi, tuna fisherman, or a proctologist.

IOW ... what sort of WORK do you expect it to help YOU do?

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Good answer. All around holding stuck and rusty parts and also fabrication of odd and end stuff. Leaning toward a stand as from experience a lot of times a bench mounted vise is sometimes restricting for holding certain parts as the bench is in the way.

1 Dandy Dave said:

Good answer. All around holding stuck and rusty parts and also fabrication of odd and end stuff. Leaning toward a stand as from experience a lot of times a bench mounted vise is sometimes restricting for holding certain parts as the bench is in the way.

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"Good observation". But I'm not up for digging a hole for about 2 or 3 cubic yard of 'crete to stabilize a big vise on a stout post - then be unable to much move it.

"When I get a round tuit".. Considering putting one of my heavier vises at the end of about six or eight foot of I-beam or square tube with a bipod or monopod under the vise end. Possibly on a wheelie tool cart with a worktop and drop-down outrigger feet, and/or or anchor rod into a plate or HOLE, even.

Other end of the beam to be grabbed in the bigger vise on around 4,400 avoir of Alzmetall column drill's table.

Torque rod anchor kinda thing if yah can dig the leverage in it.

Kind nice to have at least ONE vise that don't much move around unless yah WANT it to do.

Could was with a 3" trailer hitch mount & receiver style socket(s), more than just the one vise and jaws off 90 degrees to either side 'stead of right side up when that works for a tasking.

2C...and "many" vices worth.... well..... still have a few vises, too.

The type of stand (or bench) you mount the vise upon depends on a few key factors, in my opinion:

1. Will the vise be in a permanent location ?

2. What type work will you be doing in the vise ?

3. How accessible does the vise need to be (will you want to work off it from all sides, rather than front and limited side access as on a bench mounting) ?

My suggestion, if you can't quite make up your mind what you want to do as far as vise mounting is concerned, is to go with a "stand" or "pillar" type of mounting.
If you are equipped to do welding and fabrication, a quick pillar mounting can be made using either hollow square steel tube for the pillar (at least 3" x 3" x 1/4" wall), or a piece of 3" or 4" standard weight (also known as Schedule 40) carbon steel pipe.

35 years ago, I was sent to the plant of the Rodney-Hunt Company in Orange, Massachusetts. We were having some stoplogs (bulkheads) made by them for one of our hydroelectric plants. Hunt had a complete "works" with their own foundry as well as fabrication shops and heavy machine shops. They were, unfortunately, bought out and that plant closed and liquidated a few years back. What struck my fancy in Hunt's shop at the time was the fact they had numerous heavy machinist vises mounted on pillar type stands that were "shop made". These stands were made using either pipe or square steel tube for the pillars and either large diameter "burnouts" of heavy steel plate (might have been "drops" from round sluice gates Hunt built) or were mounted on heavy blind flanges, or anything else that was of a good shape and mass.
Hunt had plenty of forklifts and bridge cranes in their shops, so these vise stands were moved wherever a vise was needed, next to the work or next to a machine tool.

I was so impressed with the simplicity and utility of these pillar mounted vises, I knew I wanted one. When the time came to mount my blacksmith leg vise, I made my own pillar mounting, which I describe, below.

Here is how a simple pillar mounting for a vise can be made. If you are good at scrounging and scavenging materials, you can get away fairly inexpensively.

The top can be a piece of steel plate, at least 1/2" thick, cut to a square just large enough for you to land the vise base upon. Holes can then be tapped for mounting bolts, if the holes land over the pillar (where you can't get in to make up nuts). Making the plate square has the added advantage of giving you a place to clamp awkward or oddly shaped jobs to work on them.

The base can be anything imaginable. I made a vise base for a buddy using a "condemned" Budd wheel rim. These are heavy steel wheel rims with a plate already in place to mount the rim to the hub of the vehicle's axles. Budd rims have a certain service life, after which, they have to be taken off the road and junked. I asked at a truck tire shop, and they had a "condemned" Budd rim in the scrap dumpster. It had no dings or dents in it. I promised I would not be putting it on a vehicle, and for 20 bucks, had a dandy base. A piece of plate cut to fit the center mounting surface on the rim, was welded right to that center mounting plate on the rim. A chunk of scrap 3" sch 40 steel pipe made the post, and a chunk of 1/2" steel plate found as scrap at a highway bridge job made the top.

A Budd rim is heavy enough in its own right to make a good vise base. I think you will be boing the kind of work with that Reed vise to shove or jerk a Budd rim base around. If you decide you want more solidity, weld a few cross bars inside the rim and fill it with concrete. That will make a real "anchor" out of what started out as a semi-portable base for the vise.

The pillar base I built with the Budd rim has my buddy's large blacksmith leg vise mounted on it. He beats, bangs, and bends stock in that vise and never has a problem with the base moving around on him. The rim was never filled with concrete.

My own blacksmith leg vise sits on a piece of 3/4" x 12" x 12" plate which caps a piece of scrap 4" sch 40 carbons steel pipe. This pipe is welded to a base plate of 3/4" steel plate, drilled for 3/4" bolts. The actual base is a large "blind flange" (used to close the end of piping by bolting to a pipe flange). The blind flange was scrap from a jobsite I was on. I did not know if it was cast iron or forged steel, since it had been on a temporary dredge disposal pipe system. Not enough pressure to require a forged steel blind flange. The result was I did not want to weld right onto the blind flange and discover it was cast iron. I tapped 3/4"-10 UNC holes in the flange to bolt the pillar to. The end product is solid, and I do all kinds of work with that vise. I can pick it up with the tractor and move it where I need it.

Otherwise, there is the bench mounting. I make my benches by fabricating what I call "bench bucks". My term, probably not accepted into common usage. A bench buck is a set of legs for one end of a bench with a cross-member. I make bench bucks using either 1 1/2" or 2" black steel pipe for the legs, or at least 2" x 2" angle, or square tube. The top of the buck is made using a piece of either 2" or 3" angle, drilled ahead of time for bolts, if a wood top is to be used.

The crossmember between the legs is usually another piece of 2" angle with the ends "coped" (cut to fit the curvature of the pipe legs or to make a neat joint with angle iron legs).

The bottom of each leg gets a small piece of steel plate as a pad welded on. This pad is about 3" x 3". It can be made a little larger and drilled for anchor bolts if you want to tie the bench to the floor.

I made one vise bench for a family member to go in their garage. I made the "bucks" out of 2" x 2" x 1/4" angle, with only one leg per buck. The top of each buck had a piece of 2" steel angle welded vertically, with holes drilled to allow bolting and lagging into the wall studs in the garage. The base of each leg had a floor plate with holes drilled for anchoring to the concrete garage floor. The top was made of dressed 2 x 10's, carriage bolted to the steel angle "bucks". This bench got a 3" Athol machinist vise. Made a solid bench, albeit narrow, so a car could get into the garage and the doors opened without hitting the bench.

I tend to go with the idea that "simple is better" (the K.I.S.S. principal of engineering) and that a project made from "found materials" (nowadays, the trendy phrase is "repurposed") is one of the best kinds. The trick is to know when it does not pay to use junk or found materials if the design and function of the project will be compromised. A vise mounting is something a person is likely to use for many years, so spending some money up front for the right materials if "found materials" do not turn up in a timely manner, (or would be too big a compromise in functionality) is often the best route. You get the vise mounting in time to use it while you are still 'up and at 'em' rather than old and too creaky to do much, and you get the mounting you wanted and needed for your shop.

Joe Michaels said:

The type of stand (or bench) you mount the vise upon depends on a few key factors,

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Only a few niggles have I to adjust to 2020 materials "quality" - or lack-thereof:

- I don't mess with flimsy Schedule 40 when my "local" has far better Schedule 80 settin' right in the next pile. Longer life, corrosion budget loss expected. These goods ain't been comin' outta US mills for a while, so...

- "pipe" is too often outta China nowadays as well, so 3" is about as small as is worth hauling outta the store for anything benchey.

- 2" nominal lumber is only inch and a half nowadays, forced-growth, matchstick-soft, with annual rings about a quatta hinch apart, so...

Set it on edge, nominal 3" @ 2 1/2" actual. Or deeper-yet. 2" X 6", on-edge, double-spaced, last go.

...Drill for 1/2"-13 allthread every 12", insert drilled spacer blocks where the rods run, counter bore a double set run, front and back edges so the fasteners don't snag stuff, pull 'er up.

Grab yer router or 'letric hand plane and make it right. Adjust if/as/when yah warp it.

Using Red Oak 'stead of pulpwood is a vile cheat, Maple even more so. Go ahead. Sue me... I got me a good lawster on retainer...

Idea is an open-grid - sorta like a wooden version of a welder's table.

Or go ahead and fab a "real steel" welder's table. Rustificial s**t IS cheaper than decent wood, after all.



Either way, now yah can drop stops and clamps, chains, allthread and such into or through the azures,

...and/or partially cover with decent plywood or a plate of steel or shiney-wood or conveyor belting or ...granite... or.... whenever a given project needs most but, but, buttt.. temporary-like. NOT permanently attached.

Capital "WORK". Small "bench" is the klew.

Flexible as in use, not flexible as in wobbly.

NB: I think I got some kind of "bug" from G'Dad, Dad.. and two Uncles....

We have this "family curse" of scratch-building clever workbenches... using them... eventually fretting over some detail we cudda, wudda, shudda done some other way ...figuring "it is TIME NOW" to do BETTER.. giving the bench away so as to FORCE ourselves to build a BETTER one off the experience.... and the now "pressing need" just created..

....then getting STUCK with no bench AT ALL for an annoying spell in between those episodes of joy!

Also bumping my bald haid now and then, given the Alzmetall column drill's gen'rus tee-slotted table as been my bestest workbench for a coupla years already.

The goodest news? Hand-crank HEIGHT adjustment! Which has by now spoilt me for anything lacking of that lovely feature for an Old Fart's bad back..

Only so much yah can do on a triple- 3/4" ACX ply topped Herman Miller Office desk bought cheap from Goodwill...



Asi es la vida...

I have a 3C Reed that was bought new in about 1980... I have it mounted to a circular table that is 1 1/2" thick and probably four feet in diameter with pipe and wide flange legs....I love it but you better have some kind of hoist to move it.. I love the setup...Cheers; Ramsay 1

Thanks for all the replies fellows. I've got a decent pile of Iron to pick though. I'll post back when I get a roundtuit and mount it up. Dandy Dave!

Reed always built quality products. I've got some of their pipe tools (wrenches, mostly), and have seen a few of their vises along the way.

The vise Dandy Dave has posted about looks to be in really good shape for an old vise. Anything Reed made was heavy-duty and light-years beyond what's available today that passes for machinist bench vises (unless a person is prepared to spend some serious money for a Yost or Morgan machinist vise, and maybe Columbian if they are still made here in the USA).

Thermite:

Your prose, aside from it's usual high pH level, is as per usual, a bit stilted and hard for a person such as myself to follow. However, pipe nowadays comes from all over the globe. I've been seeing a lot of schedule 40 black carbon steel pipe coming in from "UAE" (United Arab Emirates). I've seen screwed galvanized pipe couplings made in Saudi Arabia. Forged steel butt weld fittings come from all over the place, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, as well as the USA. When I was still working at the power plant, we were running some 6", 8", 10" & 12" stainless steel piping to replace the original 40 year old carbon steel cooling water piping. We were going with butt welded joints and using butt-weld fittings wherever possible, and also using some Victaulic grooved joints so the system piping could be easily taken apart during maintenance work.

We got stainless steel pipe that was piss poor. The name on it was something like "Marcigaglia USA". The problem with the pipe was it was badly out of round and the wall thickness varied from one length to the next. The fitters had all they could do to match up pipe-ends for good clean butt welds (GTAW root, SMAW for the hot and cover passes). I tracked down "Marciagaglia USA" and discovered they were in Pennsylvania. Called them up to find out what kind of junk they were shipping out as good pipe. I got a human being, a real engineer, who had worked for old-line US steelmakers in their pipe mills. He told me the story:
-When Big Steel (US Steel and Beth Steel) and "Little Steel" (Jones & Laughlin, Inland Steel, Weirton and a few others) all either folded or retrenched, the wreckage of the traditional steel industry in the USA was bought up by foreign investors. This included Marcigaglia, an Italian group, who bought up some of the tube and pipe mills.

-Marcigaglia changed the way their pipe mills were operated. Instead of being fed strip stock (known as "skelp") from a rolling mill in the same steel mill under one owner, Marcigaglia had their purchasing agents purchase the strip stock from whomever had it available for the best price. This accounted for some variance in thickness.

-Marciagalia's people also took the ASTM specs for butt welded pipe and went to the limits for thinnest wall and to the limits on roundness tolerance.

-Somewhere in this mix, ASTM may also have loosened the tolerances on pipe.

The result was we were getting lousy pipe, made in a US MILL, now owned by foreign investment companies, who were looking to do things as close to the edge of the tolerances and standards as possible.

Try as I would, when I was designing and spec'ing stainless steel pipe and fittings, the fittings always came from Asian mills. I do not think there is any mill left in the USA making butt weld stainless pipe fittings. I never had a problem getting US made weld-neck or slip-on flanges, and smaller bore socket weld fittings or forged screwed fittings from US mills are still produced here.

Schedule 40 pipe has about a 3/8" wall, and is plenty stout for a vise pillar and most practical purposes. If you crack an AISC (American Institute of Steel Construction) handbook, there are published tables for "allowable axial load in Kips" (kip = 1000 lbs, or a 'kilopound') for carbon steel pipe. Used as a column, schedule 40 pipe can withstand a surprisingly large axial compressive load. I've designed a variety of structures and heavy rigging devices which were fabricated from "mill shape ( angle, channel, wideflange, etc) as well as sch 40 carbon steel pipe.

For 2"-and under pipe, we use sch 80 as standard practice. For a vise stand made with a pipe pillar, particularly since the OP's vise is not all that big, a piece of 3" sch 40 pipe is more than adequate. Sch 80 pipe is a bit harder to come by on jobsites. The industry practice, unless dealing with high pressure superheated steam or higher pressure fluid or gas flows, was to use sch 40 pipe for anything 2 1/2" and larger. When I was on jobs where piping for superheated steam was being run, it was most usually made of a chrome-molybdenum alloy steel, and often was schedule 160 (which we called "gun barrel pipe). It was pretty rare to find schedule 80 carbon steel pipe on jobsites, but then, maybe I moved in the wrong circles.

My own consideration in building a vise stand is moving it around the shop. Unless you have the means to move a heavy vise stand (tractor with loader bucket or tractor with a boom pole, backhoe, forklift, chainfall & monorail or gantry, etc), and unless you have a hellaciously heavy vise and plan on doing work on steam locomotives or similar, IMHO there is no need to go overboard on making a vise stand.

A friend of mine was a Certified Welding Inspector for a structural steel fabrication plant. She wanted a machinist vise on a pillar stand. Her employer gave her whatever steel she needed for home projects as a nice perk. The result was my friend asked the steel fab shop to CNC burn a disc out of something like 2" thick A-36 plate, about 30" diameter for the base. She then got a piece of 4" x 4" x 1/2" wall hollow square tube for the post, and a piece of 1" plate for the top. I warned my friend that this was going to be one very heavy vise stand, and also warned her to take it easy when piling on the weld to tie the top plate to the post.

My friend laid out and drilled the holes to mount a 4 1/2" Athol fixed base machinist vise on the top plate, and drilled them with a drill press. She then got the flux cored wire and went to town, laying on the weld in one continuous rip, piling up a wide multi-pass fillet weld that looked like a Mayan pyramid. I got a phone call from her: the bolt holes which lined up with the vise base when she first drilled them now were way out of line. I told her to lay a straightedge on the top plate and call me. The top plate was cambered badly from all that welding. She had to dress it back to flatness with an angle grinder and elongate the bolt holes with a die grinder and carbide burrs. On a trip to visit our friend, we saw that vise stand. It was something that you needed a forklift or chainfall to move. Overkill for a 4 1/2" Athol vise in a home garage shop where my friend planned to do very light artistic metal projects.

I've often thought it would be a nice feature to weld some "thread-o-lets" (aka "threaded bosses") to a vise pillar made of pipe. Thread-o-lets are forged steel fitting made to saddle onto a larger diameter pipe and are tapped for a screwed pipe connection. Cut a hole in the wall of the larger diameter pipe where you want to stab in a connection, and weld on the thread-o-let. Makes a nice job with adequate "compensation" (reinforcement) around the hole in the larger pipe's wall. I often though it would be a nice feature to use the vise pillar as a compressed air storage receiver as well as a compressed air manifold. If a vise is being used for welding and fabrication work, having compressed air on tap to run an air needle scaler, air chipping gun, air grinders, etc, would be handy. Multiple air tools could be connected to the air receiver that is also the vise pipe pillar. Of course, a 1/2" NPT blowdown connection at the bottom of the pillar/air receiver would be needed. Can't let condensation accumulate in there...

I like to build things heavy and to last, but there is a practical side which, aside from cost and time involved, includes maintainability and moving/setup effort.

A good way to make the "pillar stand" as Joe calls it is to use a large sq footage of thinner plate. Something like 5'x5' or even larger. This should be as thin as possible, 1/4" works good. Thin to prevent tripping on the edge.
Tube of choice up from the middle, the thin plate will need some gussets or a thicker 24" dia in the center to keep tube and vise plumb. The reason for such a large plate is that you stand on it, when you are pulling on something in the vise you are standing on the same vise so it will not turn around in circles with you following it. Not really that hard to slide it around if it needs to be moved.

I've got a similar issue.....

I have a big old Reed 404 that I need to make a base for. Problem is, the vise is heavier than any of the wheels or brake drums etc that I can locate. And it's not small, either. Something at or over 75 lb or so, from on-line sources, I have not weighed it. And then there is the weight of whatever is held in it.

I have been looking for a base that is heavy enough or large enough that I can get a piece of material in it and saw. grind, maybe bend or whatever without moving it around just from the forces of working. And, if the piece of stock sticks out a bit, I don't want the thing to fall over from the cantilevered weight.

I do not want to put it on a bench, because I may want to get around to the other side of whatever I have in it.

I am probably looking for two of them, since I also want to put an arbor press on a similar stand, with many of the same concerns over stability.

I'd do a third for the blacksmith vise, but that is probably better attached to the bench, even though it is too short, and has to be set into a piece of 4x4 that is attached on the bench leg to get the foot on a stable base. The one piece of heavy timber in the shed already has the Champion drill on the accessible side.

Modern construction just does not allow for the things that used to be attached to heavy timber posts as a matter of course. Anvils on buried chunks of tree trunk, post drills on heavy posts, etc. Benches are made light and move around too much. If you attach them to the walls, then you get incredible noise.

JST said:

I've got a similar issue.....

I have a big old Reed 404 that I need to make a base for. Problem is, the vise is heavier than any of the wheels or brake drums etc that I can locate. And it's not small, either. Something at or over 75 lb or so, from on-line sources, I have not weighed it. And then there is the weight of whatever is held in it.

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It isn't that hard. D'you recall the old microphone stands used on-stage "back in the day"? HEAVY Cast-iron base, black-wrinkle finish, had two tiny indentations. In which sat.. one-each ball bearing assembly.

Time came to move it, average grade-school kid from the "Audio Visual Club" would look down, spot that side of the base, TILT the microphone stand ony a tad, and shazammm... the heavy bugger was NOW on built-in rollers, could follow him around like a curious puppy-dog lookin' to cold-nose sumthin'.

Gots to position those wheels/bearings with a bit of careful thought & measuring, but the concept scales beautifully to recyled Bud wheels and a whole bunch of other heavy stuff. Just have to be mindful of working close to the "CG" not four feet out on an edge, so yah CAN easily tilt the heavier goods!

75 pounds? Yah gotta be joking!

Try 5205 Avoir Combo mill.. 1850 Avoir shaper... Skates are at the sides, near-as dammit right-ON CG - lookin' like a paddlewheel riverboat. The 10EE's @ 3200 avoir or a bit less are on permanent three-point skates of course. Different animals.

Release the leveling jackscrews, move the ram or carriage to tilt it, put the Vestil steerable onto the job as "nosewheel" much as a tricycle-gear War Two bomber was rigged. Move the ram again, transfer the load back onto the steerable Vestil "nosewheel".

Even my "baby" Vestil swivel-top is 10,000 lbs rated.



On a simpler vise or anvil stand, the "dedicated" wheels/rollers are not meant to even touch the deck until you apply the tilt, and there ain't meant to be but "the right amount" of tilt to make the gadget easy to handle.

That might want only a welded-on sleeve for an axle. Ignorant pry-bar it up, insert axle. Add wheels. Make yer move. Undo.

Yah can also get the 3-point tripod stability with a swing-out or add-on leg with a THIRD wheel, castering, so it is even stable, "no hands", when enroute, parked or stored in the "travel" position.

Don't lift heavy stuff. Wheels exist. Stay low, lay-low and....

"Just roll with that!"

Here is a thought as to a way to "beef up" a pillar type vise stand for heavier work/heavier vises:

1. Get a Budd rim, as I noted in my earlier post on this thread.

2. Weld some cross-pieces of round bar inside the Budd rim. These are going to act as rebar. Rebar is actually re-rolled railroad steel, and has a high enough carbon
content to cause post-weld cracking if welded with a filler metal such as ER 70 wire or E 7018 electrode. Plain round bar will work for this application.

3. Cut a disc of steel plate that is maybe 12"-20" larger in diameter than the Budd wheel rim. Plate should be at least 1/2" thick or heavier.

4. Center the rim on this plate and stitch weld it to the plate. Do not use a continuous weld of the plate will curl up like a piece of bologna on a hot griddle.

5. Fill the rim with concrete. Add any small scraps of steel you have handy to the concrete. This is strictly dead weight or ballast, not structural concrete.
Concrete weighs approximately 150 lbs per cubic foot, steel weighs approx. 480 pounds per cu ft. The more scrap steel in the concrete, the better.

6. Weld on the pipe of square structural tube pillar and top plate.

7. If the vise stand is to be moved around, a few gusset plates (triangular plates) cut/fit to the outer circumference of the rim and to the top surface of the
plate disc would be a good idea. (4) gussets at 90 degrees is a good thing. It will help keep the plate from being damaged or curled up during moving or if the vise
and stand get dropped.

8. If the vise/stand is to be used on hard concrete floors or similar, the pillar can be made a little shorter and three (3) or four (4) jacking screws and "swivel
pad" feet could be fitted thru the plate disc. Some 3/4" or 1" B7 grade All Thread rod and some class 2H hex nuts welded to the bottom plate disc, along with
check nuts and swivel pads would make a handy way of levelling up the vise stand or conforming to uneven surfaces it is landed upon.

I hesitate to recommend making a stand with a "cross" or "X" shaped base, easy as it may be. My reason for this is simply to prevent a tripping hazard. To get stability, the branches of an "X" or "Cross" shaped base would have to project some ways out and offer no real place to add mass.

Mass = dampening, a good thing on a vise to be used for heavy work like bending, beating, banging, or using air chipping guns.

I am of the belief that if a person wants to do heavy work in their shop or on their premises (such as outdoor blacksmithing and welding/fabrication work), they would do well to have some means of moving heavy stuff around. "Work the Machine.... NOT the man" is a good axiom to follow. A whole lot easier to climb on and off a tractor seat and hook a sling or chain to a heavy vise and stand, then move a lever or two to make the lift... Bad backs and hernias are too easy to acquire and we only get one set of original parts in our bodies.

I have a Backhoe here to move stuff around. It's an old Massey Ferguson 30D. And a wheel horse 16 HP with a loader for little stuff. Handy little unit as I can get it in and out of tight areas. The Massey even has a cab and a heater and is my go to machine when the snow really piles up. From data on line this Reed 4C weighs in at 185 LBS. Not all that small of a vise in my opinion. That is a Model A Ford motor in the back ground and the tape measure on the floor is past 2 foot.

Ohhh. And I found a manufacture stamped date on it. 3/47.

1 Dandy Dave said:

Ohhh. And I found a manufacture stamped date on it. 3/47.

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Meah.... 347 AD? It's a Reed or a Morgan pattern, I can believe that date..

thermite said:

.....75 pounds? Yah gotta be joking!........

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Not sure what all that was about....

The issue the OP has, with an even larger looking vise, and my "little" 75 pound x 22 inch long vise is NOT "moving" it, but making damn sure it does NOT move unless it is being moved around on purpose. With the vise holding something with jaw and work out to one side, it gets to where the forces of sawing or whatever move it around.

I don't have a source for old Budd wheels, but they don't weigh enough unless filled even f I had one. Maybe if filled it would be steady, but I'm close to 200 lb, and if I am hand sawing or filing something, it may easily tilt or scoot around on concrete unless it outweighs me.

And the stand gives fairly good leverage against the base, so it is fairly easy for it to be unsteady.

JST said:

Not sure what all that was about....

The issue the OP has, with an even larger looking vise, and my "little" 75 pound x 22 inch long vise is NOT "moving" it, but making damn sure it does NOT move unless it is being moved around on purpose. With the vise holding something with jaw and work out to one side, it gets to where the forces of sawing or whatever move it around.

I don't have a source for old Budd wheels, but they don't weigh enough unless filled even f I had one. Maybe if filled it would be steady, but I'm close to 200 lb, and if I am hand sawing or filing something, it may easily tilt or scoot around on concrete unless it outweighs me.

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Yep. Portability and utility are not good bed-partners for a vise to begin with.

4' X 8' bench, 400 avoir empty, then used to hold my then-current stock of metals, lower deck, plus a coupla bags of sand - still needed cuts of rubber and adjusting wedges under the six 4" X 4" legs. Gave it away.

Lybarger's Corollary applied.

Seems if yah can MOVE it, yah wont ever need to do.

If yah cannot readily move it, it will forever be in the wrong place. Just never the SAME "wrong" even if the same "place".

I'm still keen on the bipod and long "anti-torque" bar. Or a monopod and twin long bars.

Look at how artillery cannon are anchored. The command: "Spread TRAILS!" heard as often in brothels as battlefields, "back in the day".



"Budd" wheel off an over-the road Diesel truck wanders about on yah?
Search further. Wheel from under a Diesel-Electric locomotive is a tad more stubborn. Or just an ignorant flatcar:

Railroad wheels, scrap railroad wheels | Recycling Consultants

But here yah go. "Local pickup", but enough stock in a single go-fetch run off St Lew to Ohio to set 6 handy locations in, out, and about yer shop, @ three deadman each location, sunk in about a cubic yard of 'crete, each, and flush-plate weld-on threaded for a bolt-on tripod:

1045 HOT ROLLED ROUND STEEL BAR STOCK (18pcs) 7.25" DIA x 14.5" Long | eBay