Shopsmith Forums

A short while back I did a visual comparison of the new vise with the older vise. Today I wanted to expand on that review by actually using the vise and seeing it in a performance view.

To see the first post checkout:

http://www.shopsmith.com/ss_forum/viewt ... =9&t=15756

Today I had several projects in mind to do. One was to check out the new vise by mounting it on a bench and seeing how I liked it for that operation.

Trouble found me right away when I attempted to mount the vise to the mounting clamp. It did not fit!
The fit was not going to happen short of getting out a big hammer, something I did not want to do!

Recourse was to do some testing. First test was the new mount with the old vise. No problem there.
Next test was the old mount with the new vise. That worked well too.
Next I tried each post of the vise one hole at a time. That worked, so what is going on?
I had previous checked for burrs or other deformities so that potential problem had been eliminated.

My next best guess was something I had noticed on my visual inspection but not mentioned previously. The steel rods on the old vise seem to be coated with a black oxide finish on either cleaned out hot rolled steel or even cold rolled steel. The new vise used hot rolled steel and it is pretty raw looking. The jaws seemed to slip along well but at the end the scale was very apparent. I also expect the tolerances run out to a maximum, and the scale was not helping at all.

I got out some sandpaper and got a lot of the scale off, the result was that things began to fit. I went for a second round of sanding with some finer paper and finished with 600 grit. This was all that was needed to have a fit.
This steel is now untreated so I put some wax on it for protection so it would not rust. I might have to revisit this if rust becomes an issue.

The good news is that now I have a working system. The bad news is that I discover another issue. I'll explain that in my next post.

Ed

On the old version of the mounting system you could have the vise clamp either away or under the vise. In most of my use having the clamping under the vise is best. In fact maybe 99% of the time this is how I do it.

Lets get started with a couple of pictures so this makes more since.
This is how I would normally like to mount the vise. Note you are looking at the old mount.

While I do sometimes mount this way sometimes it is rare.
I've switched to the new mount for this picture. Now wait for the glaring find I had.
My favorite mounting method is compromised by the new design! I mean does anyone even look at these new offers before they add them to the line up?

I keep finding these issues that should have been very clear to who ever designs this stuff. Even after that shopsmith should be noting this sort of problems before they start selling them.

I've concluded today's testing. Testing will resume when I decide how I will address these issues. Might be as simple as pulling the black rubber part off and grinding the mount or coming up with a pad to bring the vise up to the level of the mount or ?????

Testing to the this point may not have found some other issues so stay tuned.

Ed

Yikes! Thanks for bringing this gotcha to our attention.

After reading your post, I checked out my recently purchased vise. I didn't have to get out the sandpaper, but it did take some working the posts in and out of the clamp to make mounting the clamp possible. It looks like we could remove the plastic clamping pad to make the vise level with the clamp, and also gain about 3/16ths of protrusion into the clamp.

Mike