Wanted 4" milling machine vise

[Marty Feldman]

Not cheap offshore goods, and not a vise in the $300+ class. Precision way more important than cosmetics.

-Marty-

 

[kf2qd]

It would seem that your requirements are mutually exclusive. Quality, precise and inexpensive don't usually go together. I would go to Amazon and look at some of their inexpensive units. I have a 3" one of those on my KX3 CNC and it has done very well for running batches of parts in small production runs. I was looking at a comparable 6" unit for $240. For home and hobby use I think it would do just fine. It is a copy of the anglock style vise, won't be as perfect as a $1300 vise, but then I probably will never notice, and I am not making the big bucks either.

 

[ChazzC]

Unfortunately out of stock, and $300+, but Clough42 was impressed by the quality of the matched pair of Shars 6” vises he bought and I would expect that the 4” would be similar:

Little Machine Shop has some very good vises as well:

 

[kvom]

I have a 4" Kurt vise (actually 2) that I'll sell for $200 each plus shipping. Used and could used a cleanup, but no holes drilled into them. Comes with regular steel hard jaws and a pair of aluminum soft jaws.

 

[ChazzC]

I have a 4" Kurt vise (actually 2) that I'll sell for $200 each plus shipping. Used and could used a cleanup, but no holes drilled into them. Comes with regular steel hard jaws and a pair of aluminum soft jaws.

That's a deal: if it wasn't that 4" is just a little too big for my Mini-Mill, I'd get them!

 

[timo_gross]

Mmh,

• not cheap
• less than half the price of the usual brand name stuff
• made in certain preferred locations.

PRECISION VISES by Suburban Tool, Inc. starts in the 600 USD range ...

Good luck with that I bought a drill press vise for about 150 USD (it is Made in Taiwan). The seller said if my milling machine is under 2 HP it can do the job.
It did the job.

For light milling a grinding vise can work.
They will also cost about 100 - 150 USD.
To buy one that did not travel the one or other ocean, is only possible if you are in the right location .


I think it is worth looking into 5-Axis work holding too.
They are sometimes a good size for 3-Axis hobby.

They are probalby more expensive than 300 USD . Can usually be clamped in several orientations, which might be useful for certain setups.
The disadvantage is the missing "coolant lip", not sure if I ever missed that function.


Greetings Timo

 

[imsteamer21]

I have a 4" Kurt vise (actually 2) that I'll sell for $200 each plus shipping. Used and could used a cleanup, but no holes drilled into them. Comes with regular steel hard jaws and a pair of aluminum soft jaws.

hi - if the vises are still available ill take both - thank fred - [email protected] - 914 720 5523

 

[Marty Feldman]

Thanks to all for above helpful replies.
For the present, I am finding that a Shars DP vise on my mill is OK. I would not go beyond "adequate", but adequate is OK.

 

[Richard Carlstedt]

I have a Burke Vise which is 4 inch for $200
Made in USA for Burke mills
In good shape but was used
Has factory handle
Hope these photos can be enlarged
Rich

Edit.. My Boo-Boo, just went and looked
It's a 3 1/2 " vise with a 2 inch opening
Sorry !

 

[Marty Feldman]

Rich - That's the closest one yet to what I had been looking for. Ever come across another one? Baseplate looks to be about 8" front to rear - is that right? How are you clamping it down to your mill table? Did Burke themselves make the vise, and was it for a #4?
-Marty-

 

[Richard Carlstedt]

Marty, it is ~ 7" x 3 1/2 " x 2 1/8" And I understand it was for a #4 Burke mill
It seems to have been made by Burke for their mill, but i have no verification as it is a very old vise
I used a toe clamp to hold the vise down but have only used it one time . I assume thats what they
did on the mill, but there is a center C'bored hole for a rotary table or attachment mounting
Rich
This is the only info I have found

 

[Marty Feldman]

Thanks for that Burke flyer, Rich. That first 3.5 incher looks sweet, a proper vise that does not scream 'China'. You did well to get yours for $200. There have to be others out there somewhere, although probably not at that price.

-Marty-

 

[user 284]

For home shop use in the 3"-4" capacity range, it's highly doubtful your going to get anything adequate in even a Kurt type clone for or under that $300 mark. I've learned the hard way to not take any shop tooling at it's face value unless I run some basic checks on what it will do. I've also read a whole lot of forum posts mentioning the cheap off shore Kurt clones are fine in a home shop. That imo may or may not always be true. After buying my mill, any extra money for tooling was pretty tight. I knew I shouldn't, but ignored my common sense and bought a pair of $200 4" Chinese Kurt clones. Very surprising to me they actually were ground and finished quite accurately. A bit under .001" in fact on every surface I checked. So things started out well until I used them. Parts were not coming out square or even parallel. So the first step was to pull one apart, any area you couldn't easily see were left in the as cast condition including the moving jaws wedge face. I also think I'd have a hard time producing any threads as poorly finished as these were. After a few hrs of deburring and fly cutting that wedge surface, I reassembled the first one and tried it out. Still the same issues for out of square parts. It was then time to break out the indicators. What I found was even under fairly light closing pressures, not only was the rear jaw flexing backwards, but the whole vise bed between the hold down bolts was bending upwards more than enough to be easily measurable on any part. I'm certainly not suggesting all of the cheaper clones will have the same really poor quality of cast iron and corner cutting light weight internal construction, but how do you tell which do or don't until after there bought. I can fix or remachine a lot of items including making new screws and nuts if I really had to, what none of us can fix is if the castings themselves are defective or poorly designed just to save a buck or two of cast iron. At best these vises are I think barely adequate as something for use on a drill press. Eventally I did replace them with a pair of 6" cnc type clones that I'm now happy with. But it was a $400+ lesson in what not to do.

There is a good alternative though and under your price point, those grinding or tool makers vises. For awhile Stefan Gotteswinter on YT was using them and also mentioned the company he worked for used the same for commercial cnc part production. In my opinion there are a couple of items to ensure whatever you buy includes them. I've seen a few at the very cheap end where the fixed jaw is a bolted on separate piece, the better ones will all have a one piece tool steel vise bed and fixed jaw. Secondly and for use on a mill, and there a bit easier to find today, you want any of these grinding style of vises to have both end and side slots for use with hold down clamps. Without those side slots, it makes it much more complicated to get them properly clamped down. And a lot of the lower priced one's don't or can't provide accurate bed heights if your needing more than one, so that's also something to check with whatever tool dealer your using. I've got a couple of 3" and one 4". All were in the $120 - $180 range. Checked on a surface plate with 10ths indicators, there flat, parallel and square at or under the .0002" they were guaranteed to be on every dimension I checked. Even Kurts aren't built to that accuracy. There are a few minor trade offs though, a bit less actual part clamping force than the anglock design, but I've never had a part pull out of one yet. And there a bit slower to open and close the moving jaw when large jaw position changes are needed. In hindsight, a matched pair of these grinding vises would have been cheaper, far better and still just as usable today than what I first bought. And for there maximum part capacity, these vise designs are a lot shorter than the Kurt type, so overall I think fit much better on any of the smaller mills.

 

[Marty Feldman]

Pete - I hear you re: low-end chinese vises. As the OP indicates, I was looking for a real vise, "not cheap offshore goods". It seems to have become fashionable to point out that for a price China can manufacture good quality items. But you highlight an important point: look beyond the surface. It is common to find attractively priced Chinese products looking top notch, with really nice surface finishes, but when you dig into the innards that are hidden from casual inspection you find that corners are cut at every turn. Poor machining, sloppy tolerances, cheap screws, etc. - things that will fail and result in substandard or spoiled work. The answer if one wants to stay within a poor man's budget is to hold out and hope one day to stumble across a properly made item offered by an honest machinist who is not out to enrich himself. In the meanwhile, one makes do with the low-end crap. It's not something to be proud of, but hopefully it is a temporary intermediate move. Of course, with a nice fat budget, shop problems have a way of vanishing.
-Marty-

 

[user 284]

Well I also should have added but forgot, that your not going to find anyone more honest than Rich. If anything he's under pricing whatever he's willing to sell, and I know that from my own personal experience because he made me a fantastic deal on something I'd been looking for.

 

[L98fiero]

Pete - I hear you re: low-end chinese vises. As the OP indicates, I was looking for a real vise, "not cheap offshore goods". It seems to have become fashionable to point out that for a price China can manufacture good quality items. But you highlight an important point: look beyond the surface. It is common to find attractively priced Chinese products looking top notch, with really nice surface finishes, but when you dig into the innards that are hidden from casual inspection you find that corners are cut at every turn. Poor machining, sloppy tolerances, cheap screws, etc. - things that will fail and result in substandard or spoiled work. The answer if one wants to stay within a poor man's budget is to hold out and hope one day to stumble across a properly made item offered by an honest machinist who is not out to enrich himself. In the meanwhile, one makes do with the low-end crap. It's not something to be proud of, but hopefully it is a temporary intermediate move. Of course, with a nice fat budget, shop problems have a way of vanishing.
-Marty-

Fashionable or not, you get what you pay for!

 

[timo_gross]

It seems to have become fashionable to point out that for a price China can manufacture good quality items.

Haha: Rain has become "fashionable" everybody (but me) is wearing a rain cape. LOL. Or maybe its just Taifun season in south pacific?
Greetings Timo

 

[Steamchick]

I have a variety if vices... some "proper" engineered stuff, made with high quality cast steel, right down to "monkey metal crude holding things"...
But the "best quality" is not the old and worn third-hand ex-industrial workshop engineering vice from the 1940s, but a new Chinese-made machine vice on my milling machine. - This said because "new" means not worn, strained or bashed out-of-true, and will not be used as a screw press, a bar bender, anvil or some such... Just to hold things precisely where needed for the machining process. But I love the big old Engineers' vice, warts n all!
Pick what you can afford from available sources, and don't wish for more. - You'll be happy that way.
A man with many vices needs a large medical insurance... and wears a large smile.
K2

 

[stanstocker]

I bought a Glacern milling vise quite a few years ago. Just their basic vise, not a specialty CNC certified super deluxe, the one that looks like a nicely done run of the mill 4 inch one.

It has been excellent, although the prices like all the others have gone up a lot. I'm not sure that I would notice any difference between it and the Shars vice that is about $170 USD less. It is a bit better than the three inch more generic import milling vice I purchased in the 1990's, although being from the Taiwan days and an importer who actually cared it is also quite good.

When a large green paint tool company in the US was still in Pennsylvania I went to their showroom and even the display lower end milling vises were quite poor, some even had a slightly crunchy feel. So did some of their "premium" stuff as well. I would avoid most of the vises I've seen in the under $300 price range these days. BUT - a reasonably good vise you can clean up and improve with soft jaws or some fitting sitting in your shop still beats the high dollar one you can't afford sitting in a catalog. No new Kurt vises here, I'm just a hobby guy who makes steel and brass wool for fun now and then.