Drill Press Vise Wrap Up

I'm calling it done at this point. After cleaning and repairing the bonus Kurt vise I acquired with the Clausing drill press its ready for use. I built a special base and anti rotation arm to make quick work out of clamping the vise to the drill press table.

The vise base is a .50 thick phenolic plate. I had the material left over from another job and it made sense for this application. Its strong and durable and wont mark the table. It has the perfect amount of friction that allows the vise to move around but is not so slippery that the vise will move under heavy drilling. The vise mounts to the plate via a couple of Helicoiled tapped holes. The notch is for the steel anti-rotation arm. I just scribed around the base of the vise casting and band sawed the profile and notch to match. You can see my chicken sketching on the side of the flat bar arm.

I wanted the anti rotation arm to be one inch wide. All I had in stock was two inch wide material. Nothing is easy right? I band sawed the two inch lengthwise and then milled the edges. Something to note when you do this type of splitting of a rolled bar. The cut immediately opens up and the two pieces come out curved from the stress relieving cut. I have had this happen before so I allowed extra cleanup stock so I would finish one of the bars to one inch wide. The clamps are holding a strong back back bar to keep the narrow bar from vibrating while machining.

So in this shot we see the vise mounted to the base plate and the anti-rotation arm attached. I found a cheap swivel socket wrench at HF that seems to work as a decent replacement for the missing Kurt article.

My McMaster box arrived today so I was able to complete the anti-windmill arm clamp. I think we all have a horror story on the drill press that we could relate. Its nice to not have any roadblocks to doing the right thing with clamping on the drill press.

The clamp allows the arm to slide in and out and pivot when loosened. When the clamp lever is cinched down the vise is locked in place. It can be quickly and easily removed if you need the entire surface of the drill press table for a large part. The Kurt vise is pretty heavy so it makes for a solid drilling experience.

So my famous drill press story goes like this. I was making some special plastic starwheels for a bottle filling machine. These look like big sprockets with teeth the same shape as the bottle being filled. Their purpose is to time and guide the bottles into the filling machine. These particular wheels were made from PVC plastic plate. It takes two star wheels to make a set they are connected by a spacing hub and attached with flat head screws. I needed to countersink the mounting screws after drilling the holes in the plates. We used to make these in the pre-CNC days by carefully pasting a full scale drawing on the material and then band sawing the curves and arms of the star wheel. It took a few hours to do a nice job on these with the sawing, sanding and filing. The mounting holes were one of the last operations.

We did a lot of 316 stainless in that shop so my countersink was pretty hammered. I went and got a brand new countersink from the machinist tool crib to use on my nice new star wheels. I remember it well because it was 3/4 inch in diameter and sharp as a scalpel. I saved a trip on the way back by picking up a flat head screw from the bolt bins to gage the countersink diameter. The mill was being used so I decided to use the drill press in the welding shop to countersink the holes.

Here where it starts to get interesting. I remember saying to myself, "I'll just hold this down by hand to the table" See this is how it starts, one little dumb thing. The next thing I told myself was, "I don't need to set the depth stop, It takes so long to run the damn thing down so far" I chucked up the countersink and set the drill press speed fairly slow.

These things happen so fast it always surprises me. The millisecond the single lipped countersink touched the edge of the pilot hole it snagged and sucked my star wheel plate right off the table. I somehow managed to hold onto the plate but all that did was make the countersink actually drill through the plate. Instead of a countersink for a 1/4 flat head screw I now had a three quarter inch diameter round hole in its place. My butt tightening event was over in about 500 milliseconds.

Every time I need to countersink soft plastic from that point on I either have the part securely clamped, or the cutting tool is non powered. Fortunately for me PVC cements well so I was able to make a plug and glue it in and re-drill and countersink the hole and save the part. With that cement the countersinking lesson was permanently bonded to my hard drive.

Thanks for looking.

Tom Lipton