Am I a fool to buy this mill/drill?

It arrived today. It's beautiful! :) Now I'm wishing my mini-lathe had such a gorgeous motor and controller. Oh, well... :)

It came with this rather good-looking vise:

I'm wondering, seeing the size of the thing, whether I might want a smaller, simpler vise to go with it? Something like a cute little Kurt vise, or even a screwless vise from, say, Little Machine Shop:

-tih

Congratulations!

Heed Jim Wilkins' previous posts:

1) Take the Sieg vise off the swivel base - you will gain rigidity, Z-axis space and some space on the table. On mine the holes were smaller than the mounting slots on the swivel base. It took me a while to overcome this but then I am slow... 2) The LMS vise is the same size - 80 mm. What would you gain by getting it instead? Furthermore, Jim explained why this is a bad choice. I had a look at the smaller version in my local shop and I agree with him. It could be a right PITA to operate.

You can narrow down the answer to that excellent but open-ended question by deciding if the projects will be models or full-sized working equipment, which in my case means repair parts for tools, garden-type machinery and vehicles. You can choose the scale of a model but have to make repair parts the same size as the originals.

I bought an RF-31 mill-drill once because it was large enough to drill any spot on a 5-1/4" relay rack panel.

jsw

---------- Much will depend on the size and type of work that you are doing.

What are most of your projects?

Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

That question needs to be asked *before* you get the X2. Once you bought it it is pretty much answered...

speaking of mills, a friend is wishing to dispose of an Atlas horizontal mill for $800, I think it has some tooling - on the left coast - if you are interested, drop me a note and I'll forward the email - don't reply to this message though - go to

to get a working email address

Sounds good, but I'd be (possibly needlessly) worried because of the size of the thing. I'd have to bolt it to the nearest T slot, which would have almost half the bottom of the vise hanging in the air in front of the table, and the work piece held over the rear edge of the table. I guess the table and the vise are both stiff enough to let me do this, but the zig-zag geometry of the fixtures feels wrong. At the same time, the work piece is held quite high, adding moment arm to the side forces trying to twist and turn the table.

I guess what I was thinking was that a smaller vise might sort of fit the table better, and be bolted to it in a more symmetrical manner, while holding the work piece over the table itself, and not more than an inch, say, above it. Surely, the target, when mounting a work piece, must be to get it as close to the table surface, and as centered on the table, as possible?

Ah, yes. That's the one he mentioned, of course. Anyway, I may be worrying for no good reason -- but I still suspect that I might be better off returning the ($150) Sieg vise, and looking for something like the quick vise on instead.

Anyway, if I'm just being silly here, and should pipe down and make some swarf instead, please tell me so! :)

-tih

After you remove the vise from the swivel base you can attach it anywhere on the table with a clamp kit:

are excellent for work too large or awkward for the vise, like boring an engine cylinder or drilling switch holes in a sheet aluminum chassis.

Presumably the Y axis travel is about equal to the table Y width and you can't move the table completely out from under the spindle, no? Then the work-holding part of the vise should be over the table as well. The rest of the vise can overhang.

On my mill the table is 6" wide front to rear, the vise is 16" long. I had to cut off the fixed jaw end bolt-down tabs that banged into the mill's column, and the screw end of the vise extends toward me so far it interferes with the Y axis crank sometimes. With the jaws fully open (110mm) the work is still over the table.

I like to position the vise such that when the table is fully forward the largest end mill I commonly use is slightly behind the rear fixed jaw, so it doesn't interfere with loading the vise. This means I can run the table forward (Y) until the end mill is behind the work to change Z without losing X position. However you do it you need to be able to cut all the way back to the fixed jaw.

The two mills I've set up this way had the head mounted on a sliding ram so I put the vise on first and then slid the head into position. I was able to line up the vise mounting lugs with tee slots. I suppose you could attach a vise that doesn't line up to a steel baseplate and then drill the plate over the tee slots.

Once you are sure you will keep the vise you can mill a shallow slot under the base for a locating bar that fits a tee slot. Then you don't have to square up the vise whenever you remove and reinstall it.

jsw

I bought the LMS 3" swivel vise last fall for my X2. Removed the base to storage, mounted vise to the X2 Perfect fit, very pleased with it.

That fixed jaw does look a bit far forward, granted. I cannot comment if that matters or not. Can you measure the distance from the mounting holes to the end of the fixed jaw along the Y-axis?

BTW for that money you can get *two* vises of different configurations :-)

That's a pretty good size, too! If your table is anything like mine it will overhang quite a bit. I have a 2" vise and so far have not needed anything bigger. OTOH a big vise will do the job of a smaller one but not vice versa

I don't know about the others but for me this sort of thread is the raison d'etre of this group.

Into the base of the vise itself? Don't you have to remove the vise and turn it over for that. I cannot visualize it...

Yes. Make a rectangular bar thats a sliding fit in the tee slot, clamp it part way into the slot with a block underneath and mill a narrow step in both sides. The sides of the steps will then be parallel to the X axis whether or not the tee slots are. They weren't on the RF-31.

Clamp the vise upside down on the steps. Now the jaws are parallel to the X axis. Mill a *shallow* slot in the base to accept the stepped side of the bar. I try for a finger-tight press fit. Drill and tap for two screws to hold the bar on when you pull the vise off the table.

Only the width of the slot and the bar need match, the slot doesn't have to take the full depth of the step in the bar. After milling the steps I smoothed them and beveled the top edges with a file before cutting the slot in the vise base.

I haven't tried it but I think you could make the bar extend beyond the sides of the vise and put nut plates under it to clamp the vise down to the table if the built-in mounting tabs don't line up with tee slots.

I hope that's clear. It's hard to take a fresh look at it after editing it over and over for an hour.

jsw

Yup - I have one of those kits; the standard 42 piece 12mm (7/16") T-slot, M10 threaded kit. I had to find a couple of M10 screws and cut the heads off them to be able to clamp the vise, though: the clamp kit can't clamp anything that thin, because even the shortest of the supplied studs are too long. (They have this non-threaded bit in the middle that limits how close to the table you can get the nut.)

In fact, I'm a tiny bit miffed at Sieg for not including any mounting hardware for the vise with either the mill or the vise. The mill came with two T-nuts. Would it bankrupt them to include the right size studs and nuts, too, so it was ready to accept a vise? I'd happily forgo yet another set of cheap and ugly end wrenches to offset the cost. :)

Wow! OK, I'm not going to worry about the vise overhanging the table. I'll just make sure I've got it clamped so that it's firmly held to the center of the table, with the work piece held so that it, too, is over the table itself.

Thanks for your help!

-tih

It is. This would save a lot of fiddling with a dial indicator to square off the vise each time it is mounted. A fun project, too!

-tih

About 6cm (2 1/3"). Not an awful lot, but it means I have to bolt it to the frontmost T-slot to keep the work piece over the table. However, if I'm going to do as Jim suggests, and make it self-aligning, I think I'll drill a couple of new mounting holes, as well, so the vise can be bolted to the central T-slot, while the alignment bar sits in one of the other ones, with the face of the fixed jaw suitably placed near the rear edge of the table.

Not over here, you can't. :)

-tih

Three periods is the "proper" way to indicate omitted text, if you care:

I should put spaces between them, and would if someone was paying me for this.

jsw

Ditto. thanks for starting this one up.

While I am very pleased with the 3" LMS vise, I am looking at buying a smaller screwless vise for small work

If you find a good sale price two identical ones are useful to hold long narrow work, like 8mm square brass bars. You could for instance grab both ends of a thin bar and block the two vises high enough to clear the bed of your main milling vise, then step the work through the main vise as you mill the top edge. Narrow strips are otherwise difficult to cut down unless you have even narrower parallels to support them.

I have only used a screwless vise on the surface grinder where the fussiness of moving the inner bar doesn't matter.

jsw

Yes. That is very clever! And useful. I have my vise mounted slightly to the side so I can mount my 4" 3-jaw chuck on the other half of the table. As it is they still fight for space.

I gotta look at this seriously.