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Milling vice step jaws

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TTMotorsports

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Ok so I have this vevor 6" milling vise on my bridgeport. I mainly use it as a drill press. My old mill the jaw's of the vice had a 3/16" deep 1/8" wide step on the top edge, which made clamping flat sheet metal parts into it to drill and not worry about hitting the base of the vise. I want the same style jaws for this vise. I tried to machine a step it the vise jaws on the mill but the vise material is harder than my HSS Mill. If I can't find any I'll just draw a pair up on solidworks and have a local machine shop make them for me, but buying some already made will be cheaper/easier.

www.vevor.com

VEVOR 6 Inch ACCU Lock Down Vise Precision Milling Vice 6 Inch Jaw Width Drill Press Vise Milling Drilling Machine Bench Clamp Clamping Vice (6\'\') | VEVOR US

VEVOR Precision Milling Vise offers a tough cast iron body, 45# steel jaws, 29 kN clamping force, and high accuracy screw for precise and durable performance.
www.vevor.com www.vevor.com

Right now I have some machining parallel's taped onto the vise jaws and it works but when I want to clamp something in to mill it I have to remove them before use and I'd like to have the step jaw's be permanently part of the Vise.

Any leads or suggestions on what I should/can do here.
 
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CapriMikeC

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Make yourself a few sets of soft jaws. Get some mild steel or aluminum bar 1" x 2", cut to any length and put a couple holes in. They are easy to machine any shape into, are cheap enough to ruin and swap in/out in a minute. You can even hold round parts in the vise with a bore in the jaws. Small and large shops do this every day.
 
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AEAdam

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CapriMikeC said:
Make yourself a few sets of soft jaws. Get some mild steel or aluminum bar 1" x 2", cut to any length and put a couple holes in. They are easy to machine any shape into, are cheap enough to ruin and swap in/out in a minute. You can even hold rough parts in the vise with a bore in the jaws. Small and large shops do this every day.
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And, ya know, if you have a mill, you can make your own vise jaws without much difficulty. Step one, get a couple blocks of aluminum, which doesn’t grown on trees.

So, because your vise is likely a Chinese rip off of a Kurt, (loved the ad copy you linked btw, as if ANY intellectual property was developed by that manufacturer) you can probably buy a set of Kurt compatible aluminum jaws on eBay for cheap and mill the slot in them. Just check the screw spacing.
 
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RoninB4

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-A carbide end mill may cut the hardened steel jaws you now have but doubt the internal corners of the step will be sharp/square as you'd want them to be. Why not get some tool steel (A-2) and make your own? A corner relief can be added with a slitting saw or tiny end mill. Then ask local machine shop to just harden/temper them. Would be less expensive than local shop doing everything. Soft jaws or parallels are SOP too.
 
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dr_clyde

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I rarely use hard jaws in my milling machine vises. I use aluminum soft jaws for most work. I buy them in bulk from Monster Jaws and then I can just machine whatever profile I want into them as needed. A ten pack of jaws for a standard Kurt vise is less than $200 and will probably last you a decade or more in a home shop. For less than $20/pair I can't justify making my own.

Parallels get used occasionally, but I find the ease of aluminum jaws to just be more effective for my workflow. If they get banged up or damaged, just re-cut the feature. Eventually, they get recycled. Having a set of jaws cut for a vee so a vee block isn't needed is especially handy. I also have some cut with some special profiles so I can hold odd shaped parts or things I wouldn't otherwise be able to grab.
 
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AEAdam

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whateg01 said:
Measure the bolt spacing first. I have had a couple of oddball vises that did not use standard bolt spacing.
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Yeah I said the same thing above. Pretty sure my Kurt uses 3/8” cap screws. Could be the chi-com vise is metric and the counterbores aren’t right.

But honestly, I can’t buy 2 beautiful pieces of scrap aluminum for less than $20. Assume you are buying presized stock. If the holes or counterbores aren’t perfect, you can fix them very easily.

I think if you can’t sort out vise jaws with a Bridgeport and want to make a CAD model and send it out to a machine shop, the Bridgeport Police will come to repo your machine. They put it in the machinist poser impound lot. Sort your jaws! You can do it!
 
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AEAdam

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More: I bought a 4” Chinese version of that vice for my mini mill. (It think it was like $200). Looked pretty good out of the box. Removed the swivel base and the casting under it was pretty rough.

Suspicious, I tossed it on my 9X12 mini surface plate and the top surface the jaw slides on wasn’t parallel to the bottom. Never checked if the swivel base corrected the error. May well have. Lacking a surface grinder, that’s kind of a problem. So I trammed the head to the vise and not the table. That’s not really a solution. I shimmed the vise on the table. That was better. But I could only get so close, because the mini mill’s table wasn’t flat.

Bug in your ear. A $100 vise is one hellava deal if it’s good. Yours may be! But be sure to check.

FWIW I ended buying a 20yr old Kurt PT-600 for $250 which is a jewel of a vise. And that’s one of my lessons with machinist tools: used high quality tools are often comparable to (sometimes way cheaper than) new Chinese tools that are not as well made.
 
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whateg01

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The vise that was on my round column mill drill when I bought it was missing the moving jaw. I measured the fixed jaw, bolt spacing etc and made a new one from mold steel. Wouldn't go on. Found that one of the bolt holes in the moving jaw was in the wrong place and at an angle. It would have been a great drill press vise if I still had it. I picked up a couple Kurt CNC vises a few years ago for 100 each. Went to buy one and thought how often could I possibly need two vises? Of course I bought them both. Second one has been in the cart since I got it home.
 
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AEAdam

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whateg01 said:
The vise that was on my round column mill drill when I bought it was missing the moving jaw. I measured the fixed jaw, bolt spacing etc and made a new one from mold steel. Wouldn't go on. Found that one of the bolt holes in the moving jaw was in the wrong place and at an angle. It would have been a great drill press vise if I still had it. I picked up a couple Kurt CNC vises a few years ago for 100 each. Went to buy one and thought how often could I possibly need two vises? Of course I bought them both. Second one has been in the cart since I got it home.
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You ****! Kurt CNC vises probably start around $1000. Funny and also a little sad how super high quality machine tools sometimes sell for scrap metal rates.
 
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RoninB4

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whateg01 said:
It makes it pretty convenient not having to fight with parallels falling over between parts.
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-Either use worn out die springs between the parallels or that steel strapping gets bent into a "Z" form. The plastic strapping won't do and the cheap strapping likely won't either. Use the stuff that looks deep blue from heat treating, cut up several sizes of "Z" it lasts a long time and it's free. Just a suggestion.
 
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AEAdam

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CapriMikeC said:
Brand new direct from Kurt is retail $811. https://www.kurtworkholding.com/product/kurt-dx6-crossover-vise/

Same thing through a local-to-me distributor for $730. https://www.pts-tools.com/kurt-dx6-0721736.html
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Those are the base models that everyone copies. The DX6 6” vise is a fixture in every machine shop I’ve ever been in (and I’ve been in many). This is the model Glacern, Enco etc all copied.

Less copied are Kurt’s more expensive “CNC” vises.

www.kurtworkholding.com

Kurt VersatileLock Vise - 3600V

Manual VersatileLock Vise, 6"
www.kurtworkholding.com www.kurtworkholding.com

This the new model of the one I bought for $250. These monsters are ground square on 4 sides, bottom, both sides and back end. They can be held in any of these orientations. The sacrifice is they don’t have the tooling tabs on the sides so they are a little less convenient to mount.

Here’s mine featuring my questionable paint job:
IMG_8565.jpeg
Couple of things to notice:

There’s an extra clamping slot running vertically for end mounting. That’s one of the features that differentiates these vises (flat sides is the biggy).

I have a spare steel jaw mounted on the back end. That’s good as a handle but can also be used as a jaw when the inner fixed jaw is removed. This way you can use the top of the vise as support. That’s why you see “Mill Marks of Shame” on the top surfaces sometimes. Of course you can mount a jaw on the back of the moving jaw similarly.

Last, ignore my hasty hold downs and tacky paint job. These originally came ground with the logo milled into the side as shown.
 

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whateg01

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RoninB4 said:
-Either use worn out die springs between the parallels or that steel strapping gets bent into a "Z" form. The plastic strapping won't do and the cheap strapping likely won't either. Use the stuff that looks deep blue from heat treating, cut up several sizes of "Z" it lasts a long time and it's free. Just a suggestion.
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Don't need to. I have jaws that do it for me
 
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AEAdam

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TTMotorsports said:
Ok I got some 6" soft jaws off amazon and it worked good. Had to machine bottom of the jaw down to get the bolts to line up vertically. Then I milled a step into them.
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At extreme risk of sounding condescending, I’m super happy to read this. This sounds like this thread and your hard work turned out great. Thanks for posting.

PS it’s funny how the Kurt clones are just a little bit off. Like was it the difference between 2” and 50mm? If you going to the trouble to make a Kurt clone, I think I’d start with the jaws and vise handle and make those interfaces identical. Or maybe it was the soft jaws that were “some assembly required”.

Either way, well done!
 
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