Carla: post a few pictures of those swivel bases if you get a chance or if a GJ member hasn't already bought all you have. your humor is amazing and your knowledge even better. Vise as a collectable?? i can't speak for all the guys because we all have our different reasons, but i myself find an upgrade or a nice vise i want buy to maybe use and i'm just not ready to sell the one it might be replacing on the bench. not sure I've got triple digits yet, but i have a few. no 5198 or 300 pound Craftsman/Reed yet so the search continues.
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Hi DIF,
Well, macgee's photo above should suffice.....the Anglock swivel bases all look like that one, except that his is shiny new, and the ones I have here are 'grungy' from long storage. If anyone is actually interested in trying this adaptation, I'll take some measurements and post them here......what matters is the distance between the binder bolts, and the O.D. of the mount surface of the base.
An Anglock base should be more than strong enough to serve as an 'adapted' swivel for a bench vise.......imagine one used on, for example, a light pattern Cincinnati 16" shaper, which puts 5hp on a single-point tool-bit., or, say, a #2 size K&T mill, which would put 5 or 7-1/2hp on a milling cutter......that loading is quite a bit more than the usual small bench vise would ever see, with the exception of 'lump-hammer Harry' and his mates, who will break any bench vise, sooner or later.
I have more than enough bench vises for any need I might ever have, so I've not the least bit of motivation to convert a fixed-base one to swivelling, but it seems possible that someone who now already has a nice fixed base vise, and wants a swivelling one, could use one of these bases for the adaptation.
Its purely a hobbyist idea, of course.....a cheap way to have a swivelling vise, if one now has one of the good British vises, and would prefer it to swivel.......which is indeed useful, for the generality of bench work.
Kevin Scott could, quite easily, make up the 'adaptor plates' on his CNC mill, from a drawing, but I've no idea as to whether he'd be willing to do that.
The 'T-slot bolts' needed are an 'off-the-shelf' item from any good supply hous
edited........in the pre-CNC era, when countless thousands of small parts were made on manual mills of the Bridgeport class, those bases were commonly used as a convenient mounting for 'expendable tooling', meaning that they were a good holder for a piece of aluminium tooling-plate, which would have 'nests' milled for workpieces, and tapped holes for clamping, with Destacos or improvised strap-clamos. This was a 'cheap, quick, and dirty' class of fixturing used for repetitive operations, in which one part feature would be milled, drilled, c'bored, or tapped, whilst held accurately in the fixture 'nest'......one part after another......low-wage machine operators would go bonkers from the boredom on thousand-part runs.
cheers
Carla
????) I couldn't stand it any longer and decided to go get my portable leg vise from when I was blacksmithing.
