A Vise for Cutting

First off: yes, it's "vise." The other word, "vice," is something different, as in "Miami Vice." But if you're looking for a big metal holding thingy on Craigslist, it pays to search for both spellings!

Part of my modest collection of machine tools is a small metal-cutting band saw. I had been using it with varying degrees of success with a homemade sliding table, but I wanted better. Specifically, I wanted a vise that could hold the material very near the blade, while keeping my fingers a very safe distance away. After pondering a bit, I bought this at Harbor Freight - on sale and with a 20% discount coupon, it was only about $15:

Usefully wide and heavy, but those coarse, oversized mounting ears had to go - they were just in the way. I sliced them off with the bandsaw, and then used my milling machine to carefully mill the cut edges on both sides flat and perpendicular to the jaw face:

While playing with that, I also milled the cut-off pieces flat and parallel. They must be useful for something other than props for photos. I just don't yet know what.

It occurred to me that if I was careful in aligning those edges while milling, then they should be the same distance apart at either end of the vise, 8.75" apart. If one edge or both were misaligned, then the edges would not be parallel and would taper from one end to the other. I did pretty well! The left picture says 4.4905", the right (at the other end of the vise) says 4.4900". Machinists call that difference "5 tenths" - that is, 5 ten-thousandths of an inch. That cheap caliper actually can't even be trusted to that level of accuracy, but those are my numbers and I'm sticking with them!

After the vise modification was done, all I needed was a fence to guide it. I settled on an aluminum bar that was handy. I drilled and tapped holes in the bar to hold mounting screws, drilled matching holes in the saw table, and mounted it with threaded knobs underneath the table. It only takes seconds to remove. The result is a vise that is safe, easy to guide, and capable of a finely controlled cut:

There is actually a lot more that I can do to this vise to improve it, but I may buy a second one for those experiments. This one is already more accurate than the rest of that saw, so it's perfect for the task at hand.