I was high bidder on a Kurt vice on E-Bone

[Buckshot]

...........You experienced machinists may laugh but I really had no idea how big a 6" Kurt milling machine vise was :D. I got it for $200 and new on sale at Enco they're $445. It was from Reliable Tool and since shipping etc was going to be $45, I decided to drive up to Irwindale and pick it up myself. About 100 miles round trip. All I need now is a real milling machine!

After picking up the 85lb vise I just HAD to go into their walk in type store. They had bins and bins of drill bits of all descriptions, reamers, and endmills in HSS and carbide flavors. All used (some new drill bits in packages) and all for $4/lb, mix and match. Plus they had all sorts of other tooling, tool holders, horizontal mill stuff, and just tons of other junk.

Good drill bits, reamers and end mills are like jewelery to me and if it's shiney I have a heckuva time not picking it up :-). Kind of like a monkey I suppose. Before I knew it I had 5 lbs of drill blanks, bits, a couple reamers, and some endmills and HAD to get out of there before OD'ing on 'stuff'.

At home I got the vise up on the workbench without scattering organs all over the floor, and began to figure out how to take it apart to clean it up. Finally got it apart and cleaned all the chips and gunk and crud out. More importantly I got it back together and oiled up .

My current mill is half of a real POS mill-lathe combo (they do make some nice ones, but mine isn't one) and the table is only 9" x 7". I manfully heaved this honker vice up on the table. I can only anchor it in one direction due to the vise's 9" width, and it literally covers the table! Even better, there is now only about 4" of room between a 3/8" endmill and the top of the vice with the quill full up!

Oh well, at least I have the vise. One of these days I'll have a real milling machine to put it on. In the meantime, I suppose it's a good place to store it.

..............Buckshot

[Willbird]

The Kurt is a nice Vise, while you have time whittle yourself out a few sets of soft steel jaws, then you can mill and bore them to hold weird objects, you can make them taller and with the bolt holes in center top to bottom and they will be then double sided. If you make them thick enough you can counterbore both sides and end up with them 4 sided. A set with Vees both ways is nice, one can cut Vees at an angle to hold parts at 45 or 30 degrees when needed (I usually only cut the V in the fixed jaw

I'm not sure if you already have done so or not but you can buy a set of 1/8" thick parallals in 1/8" increments from 1/2" to 2" for like 30 bucks if you shop enco and such, I struggled with a motly assortment of parallals for years before doing so, wish I had sooner.

Kurt now makes a super 6" too that will actually hold 7", and their are generic copies as well.

The old bridgeport brand vises have the advantage of having deeper jaws, altho you can make tall jaws for the Kurt, and the wedge that pulls the moving jaw DOWN sure works nicer I think.

if you think the 6" is heavy try an 8" WITH the swivel base. :-)

I'm sure you have been round long enough to know you can use a sine bar on a Kurt vise to set angles, lay it on top of the moving jaw and against the backside of the removible jaw, set your sine bar to the angle and twiddle the vise until the sine bar indicates straight. This is handy for milling bolt action magazine boxes out in stocks, you can simply reverse the sine bar to set the angle to mill the other side of the mag box.

Bill

Bill