# Get A Grip!



## modamag (Dec 23, 2006)

One of the most common tool that I use almost every day is the vise. Especially my Panavise. I use it to hold converters, light engine and even aluminum plate for drilling (not recommended).

However, from the pictures bellow you can see the wear and tear it have. The mechanical engineer that design that vice is really good, but the marketing/sales team skimped out on the product. Stock it is fitted with a Nylon set of jaws which doesn't hold up very well to my 700 solder iron. They do have an optional Teflon jaws sold @ Mouser for $12 + $7 shipping.







After seeing Kevin (weedle) putting my lathe/mill to good use making his bike light, I got jealous and figure I should be having some fun there too.

Well after several hours or so this is what I ended up with.





I always hatted it when my palm rub against the protrusion of the jaws. This was a great excuse to use my 1/8" fillet cutters. See the nice round radius :nana:

I also made the jaws especially thick (3/8") so just in case in the future when they wear down, I'll just put them back up on the mill and reface.

Now what good would it be if we can customize it to our specific need right? I use this vice quite often to hold circular circuit boards with OD anywhere from 0.430 - 1.000". And with 2 flat jaws it could be painful late at night when you're not too sharp. It get allot worse when our guys decides to use ultra thin PCBs <0.010" instead of the standard size > 0.062". So I decided to to a small mod to my new jaws. 0.040" recess with a curvature radius of 3/8".

On large PCBs (> 0.750" OD), it'll act like a 4-jaw chuck. While on smaller ones it'll be just a 2-jaw with shoulder rest support.





Now I can hold my skinny converter board w/o much problem 

It was a great learning experience working with Nylon and a MiniMill (Sieg X2). On production machinery you got the machine perfectly trammed, sharp cutter and spindle speed of 10K RPM. Which makes the part comes out extremely smooth.

On the small mill it's much more challenging. When you crank up the spindle to 2K RPM and make a pass of 0.005" depth and slowly rotating your hand crack as you traverse the X-axis, you will generate a surface finish similar to 500 grit sand paper due to the cutting marks. Yep I do use fly-cutters and with the Y & Z axis locked. What I found is if you make 2-3 more pass back and forth it'll give you a nice and smooth finish similar to what you see from the big shops.

Overall it was a fun & proud little project.

Would I do it again and save that $19, you bet ya!


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## philw3 (Dec 24, 2006)

nice idea 

I have some cheap magnetic soft jaws that keep falling off

I just happen to have some suitable plastic stock as well. Guess I need to get my milling machine back together first though 

Phil


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## highorder (Dec 24, 2006)

excellent work! making your vise jaws into jig fixtures is very productive. I also appreciate the ability to clean them up when they get dinged up.


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## gadget_lover (Dec 24, 2006)

Nice work. Thanks for sharing.

Daniel


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## KC2IXE (Dec 24, 2006)

One idea being you have a mill - you can make a set of jaws that are milled exactly to fit the converter boards - sort of "soft jaws"


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## modamag (Dec 25, 2006)

*philw3: *If you got the "cheap" 4" rubber jaws ($5) from places like Harbor Freight the rubber on those thing are really soft. The first tight item you hold the rubber will break down and fall off. It happened to me 

For 3x the money ($15) you can get a really nice set of Flexbar soft jaws which does wonders.


*highorder & GL: *Thanx for the comments.

*KC2IXE: *It was a trade-off between the jaw specific for each board OD which range anywhere from 0.430 - 1.000". From time to time I still use these vice to hold flat parts so I like to keep that functionality.


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