What a good idea!

Gotta love 'Merka. "I built me a 40 by 80 (foot) shop. Yes it could be bigger but…"

Mr Pete also did a series on building one. Always thought it looked a useful addition to a drill press

Float Lock Vise

Why would she do that when the drawings are freely available on the internet

H

Conversely, it amazes me that China built itself up into the world's No1 manufacturer from almost nothing, with no great engineering tradition to pass down. Today, they must have more machine shops and tool and die shops than the rest of the world put together. How did they do that? True, they were previously self-sufficient and made everything themselves, but they had almost nothing. Bicycles and poor quality copies of World War 2 German motorcycles and equally ancient cars, that they produced year after year with no improvement or development. Now they make everything, including whole vehicles for the likes of BMW etc. Nobody passed ancient engineering knowledge down on how to do all that stuff. They just did it. Must have set up some massive engineering colleges and churned out graduates by the thousands or hundreds of thousands and set them to work until they got it right.

So I reckon we will be able to do it again if we have to. But next time around it will be all robots and CNC programming.

Hopper writes that nobody "passed that ancient knowledge" to the Chinese – no they bought it. The did not buy Saab from GM because they wanted to build Saabs, they bought it because they wanted to know why Saabs went round corners better than most other cars.

Dick ( A long term Saab owner)

Apologies to Blondiehacks – I clearly misunderstood something. Possibly what comes of watching Youtube on the TV where there is no access to the comments.

Anyway, I was so impressed by her efforts that I have spent a couple of days making my own from odds and ends in the workshop:

The clamp is adapted from a strange thing that I bought from a stand at a vintage fair for a couple of quid and the screw is M12 studding left over from a previous project. The jaws do lie flat but there is some rather over enthusiastic de-burring on the bottom edges . It is a very functional device and I am impressed by the design. Although it looks a bit rickety it really does lock in place.

Rod