Thanks Michael,

A good few ideas on that site, and several useful tools too. There are two items I have been meaning to add to my toolbox for some time, so you have saved me time at the drawing board.

Regards

Gray,

Grotto

I bought a very similar vice brake tool from Axminster some years ago.

Currently £55 plus postage **LINK** . Decent value.

Works well but there is certain technique to getting the bend just where you want it and at exactly the right angle. Plan a practice run. Having the bending bar made in three unequal sections seems like a good idea to allow bending a small section but in practice I found the geometry usually doesn't work out very well so it could well be less useful than you might expect. Or maybe I just don't do the right things to exploit the feature.

Biggest limitation of this type of bender is that the size of the material is limited by either the depth of the vice or by the width of material that can be passed down the side. There are times when I've contemplated faking up deep leg vice style device to handle longer stuff. I'm sure that if the need to handle long sections were great there is scope for creativity.

Clive

Hey, that's my website! How cool is that??

Glad you guys like it, this is where I put my spare effort.

@Clive you're dead on with it taking a bit of practice for getting the vise brake working the way you want it. I do think that it's a cool project though and a handy little tool for the bottom of your chest. Keep in mind that I'm used to working in machine shops with 8-10" vises, if you have a little one you might need to scale it down.

I'd really recommend giving those 123 blocks a go if you have the equipment, the way they bolt together will completely change the way you do surface table inspections.

Hi, I've used one from Waco for dedicated use in my Flypress **LINK**. Jonathan's one could adapted in just the same way, I would think. I've found using it in this way, is much more successful and better control. I like the Machinists hammer, and the depth gauge adaptions look very neat also.

Regards Nick.

P.S. click on the next photo in my link, to see a birds eye view of the backstop arrangement.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 28/08/2019 08:47:20

Nicholas

Great idea to mount a that vice mounting Vee block bender in a press. Considering the Heath Robinson work around I used when doing that would have been much more satisfactory I feel really stupid.

No excuses for me either as we had a small bench top screw press with a similar set up, albeit with a loosely fixed blade and simple Vee block, in the lab workshop back in 1972 when I joined RARDE. First job. Used it a lot for alloy sheet chassis sections et al.

The bender is well worth making for vice use alone but if you have a press seriously consider figuring out an adapter fitting. Some jobs will go better in the vice some in the press. I imagine a couple of suitably sized bars for the magnets to grab, one fixed to the base and one fixed to the ram would do. Or use the Vee base and make a set of blades with a simple pin in slot carrier to go on the ram like the one at RARDE had.

Over to you Jonathon.

Micheal

Interesting history on the 1-2-3 blocks but I think incomplete. Certainly such connect together spacer systems were considered a normal thing at RARDE when I joined. One of the machine shop apprentice training scheme projects I think. Don't know for sure 'cos I was a scientist trainee, not shop.

I associate easy commercial availability with the lower cost import tooling boom. As I recall matters there were at least two or three vendors at the first Sandown Park Model Engineer exhibition. Don't recall when I got my set but showing them to a couple of the older guys at RARDE got a "Oh hum, whats new" reaction and a general agreement that such things were around in WW2. The only surprise was that they hadn't been generally commercially available, like Vee blocks, for years. Presuambly back in the day folk either made their own or they came down from the toolroom.

Clive

Thanks Neil, right now I'm working on a few how-to videos for a new YouTube channel I'm (eventually) launching, but I'm also working on putting together some build videos on some different projects I do. I do this for a living, so a lot of the stuff I'm not allowed to post publicly (something about governments not wanting their prototype additively manufactured exoskeletons and whatnot on public display, etc etc) but in between I do make a fair bit of tooling. Definitely want to do a series on designing machining fixtures too. Provided I can work up enough energy, that is. I got three kids and spare time is on short supply.