My Cheap Milling Vice Has Issues. Can I fix It? (Surface Scraping)

Comments · 352

• RA

  @rallen7660 · 3 years ago

  The Gingery series of books on homemade machine tools uses hand scraping to a large extent, and even talks about using thick glass as a replacement surface plate. He really was a home gamer trying to get by with junk from the hardware store in an age before the Internet. I remember seeing his books all the way back in the late 70's, early 80's. There are a few forums dedicated to building his design of machine tools, using metal casting (aluminum), with wooden or lost foam patterns, and using the created lathe to build a metal shaper, mill, drill press, and then go back and make accessories for the lathe and mill. They also like to talk about hand scraping, alternative techniques, weaknesses in the design and how to improve them, even how to build using epoxy granite. A lot of the older trade manuals have wound up on the net as pdf files, and they really get the imagination going with what can be accomplished utilizing simple methods, clear thinking, and a bit of hard work.

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• CN

  @CNC_Soup · 3 years ago

  Tip from a pro machinist - Don't worry about inspecting tooling in a manner in which it won't be used.  Bolt it down to a mill table, then check flatness.  At the end of the day, you could have a perfect vise and then have a bad setup, bad ways or just bad luck.  If it's first off work, you could use the worst vise China produces and you'd still be fine.

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• SY

  @syninys100 · 3 years ago

  For the &apos;Engineers blue&apos;, I&apos;d recommend <i>not</i> using linseed oil. &nbsp;Linseed oil is a &apos;drying&apos; oil, and a good choice when you want the oil to cure to a film - but that&apos;s explicitly want you <i>don&apos;t</i> want for that for this purpose. Instead, you&apos;d want it to never dry, &nbsp;otherwise it&apos;d be a pain to clean the surface plate. Plus, linseed oil isn&apos;t usually the cheapest oil. &nbsp;Any cheap vegetable oil will work just as well; ideally you want one with a low iodine number (i.e. very far from a drying oil: so olive, rapeseed or canola, whichever happens to be cheapest. &nbsp;Sunflower is almost as good, if that&apos;s what you already have). &nbsp;Mineral oil aught to work too, but with starting from oil paint, some plant oil might blend better in that case, given that you&apos;re not expecting to need a long shelf life for it.

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• JO

  @johnmcclain3887 · 3 years ago

  I began scraping about forty years ago, buying a century old lathe that had been sitting out in the rain for decades. &nbsp;I found &quot;a professional scraper&quot; at a flea market, and spent about a year getting the bed straight and flat. &nbsp;I used four or five old files, each shaped for a different surface, going through the process very much like &apos;working this milling vise&quot;. &nbsp;I&apos;ve exactly the same vise with exactly the same problems, and happened across this video because it needs the same process. &nbsp;It&apos;s always good to watch someone else do the work, and pick up details that may have escaped one, in their own journey towards precision. &nbsp;I&apos;ve been doing this work fifty years, and learn some each and every day. &nbsp;Brazing carbide onto a steel shank is the best method I&apos;ve found for making scrapers and you can grind the carbide to shape before brazing, to get in dovetails and other tight corners/spots. &nbsp;Working the scrapes into curves covers more area, and can help level the whole plane flatter, quicker. &nbsp;I used file made scrapers for the rough work, and the carbide tipped for the fine finishing work. &nbsp;I&apos;d echo some other comments regarding the bluing and it&apos;s thinning. &nbsp;For finishing up, one needs thin bluing.

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• BR

  @bradyoung6663 · 3 years ago

  Of course Stefan makes it look easy. He&apos;s kind of a savant of machining.

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• NA

  @nadam35 · 3 years ago

  my favorite thing about your videos is- you dont always have the exact perfect tool for the job, but you find a way to get&apos;r done anyway. very nice work. i feel like i need to inspect all my vises and probably do the same.

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• AX

  @axa.axa. · 3 years ago (edited)

  You should&apos;ve blued and scrapped the top first. &nbsp;Then fly cut the bottom assuming your mil is trammed. Then returned to scrape the top for parallel.

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• CA

  @CatNolara · 3 years ago (edited)

  If it&apos;s not a surface for sliding parts (like the slides on a lathe or mill) you don&apos;t have to worry about the fineness of the blueing pattern. Just make it so that there are no big low spots left and you&apos;re good.<br><br>Oh, btw even surface grinders aren&apos;t perfect, depending on how you clamp a part it can warp and after grinding spring back, so the precision suffers. Scraping has the advantage that you check the flatness in a relaxed state of the workpiece, so it can be more accurate than grinding. I&apos;ve seen people grind parts on the surface grinder before scraping them.

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• EV

  @evzone84 · 3 years ago

  Kudos sir. That&apos;s no small task. Well done

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• JO

  @joetrenshaw5904 · 3 years ago

  It&apos;s amazing to see what kinds of amazing work can be done with relatively cheap tools and the process by which you slowly improve your abilities without crazy investments. I feel like this channel is like This Old Tony or Inheritance Machining, but with tools that are in reach for most anyone. Great work!

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• JE

  @jesperwall839 · 3 years ago

  This is what YouTube was made for! Really enjoyed this 👍👍👍😀

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• NA

  @Narwaro · 3 years ago

  Watching these videos I always start to really appreciate the supply situation. Here in Germany we can buy everything we could possibly want from industrial suppliers for prices that arent higher than some chinesium garbage. Including carbide scrapers for 45 bucks btw.

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