vise

27 Articles

Magnetic Vise Makes Positioning Your Workpiece Easier

February 14, 2025 by 12 Comments

[Chris Borge] was doing some fine tapping operations, and wanted a better way to position his workpieces. This was critical to avoid breaking taps or damaging parts. To this end, he whipped up a switchable magnetic vice to do the job.

The key to the build is that the magnetic field can be switched on and off mechanically. This is achieved by having two sets of six magnets each. When the poles of both sets of magnets are aligned, the magnetic field is effectively “on.” When the poles are moved to oppose each other, they effectively cancel each other out, turning the field “off.” [Chris] achieved this functionality with 12 bar magnets, 12 M12 nuts, and a pair of 3D-printed rings. Rotating the rings between two alignments serves to switch the set up on or off. The actual switching mechanism is handled with a cam and slider setup which allowed [Chris] to build a convenient vice with a nice large working area. He also took special effort to ensure the device wouldn’t pick up large amounts of ferrous swarf that would eventually clog the mechanism.

It’s a neat build, and one you can easily recreate yourself. [Chris] has supplied the files online for your printing pleasure. We’ve featured some other types of magnetic vise before, too. Video after the break.

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Simple Hardware Store Hack Keeps Your PCBs Right Where You Want Them

January 16, 2025 by 30 Comments

Sometimes it’s the simplest hacks that make the biggest impact.

Take these DIY magnetic PCB vises for example. Sure, you can go out and buy purpose-built tools, but [Dylan Radcliffe] just made a trip to the hardware store for some nuts and bolts. He chose 3/8″-16 bolts, which would probably be around M10 for the rest of the world. The head of each bolt is ground flat so a ceramic disc magnet can be attached to it with CA glue, while the head of the bolt gets a plastic washer glued to it. Another plastic washer gets glued to a nut, which when threaded onto the bolt provides the light clamping force needed to hold a PCB. Make four of those and stick them to a steel plate with the magnets, and you can stop chasing your boards around the bench with a soldering iron.

As much as we like this idea — and we do; we’re heading to Home Depot to buy the needed parts this very evening — we can think of a few useful modifications. With a long bolt and two nuts rather than one, you could make a set of vises that are easily adjustable along the Z-axis. This could prove useful to those of us working under a microscope. Also, rather than making the bolts the magnetic part we bet you could lay down a flexible magnetic sheet, the kind you can feed into a printer to roll your own fridge magnets. We suspect that would hold the bolts firmly enough for most work while still allowing easy repositioning. We’d also favor flange nuts over plain hex nuts, to give a larger clamping area. We’d still include the plastic washers, though, or possibly switch to rubber ones.

There’s more than one way to skin this cat, of course, especially if you’ve got a Harbor Freight nearby and a well-stocked Lego bin.

Harbor Freight And LEGO PCB Vise Is Cheap And Effective

February 7, 2024 by 6 Comments

It doesn’t take much chasing things around the bench with a soldering iron to appreciate the value of good work holding. And don’t get us started on those cheap “helping hands” alligator clip thingies; they’re somehow worse than no work holding. Isn’t there a better way?

Maybe, judging by [Paul Bryson]’s idea for a dirt cheap PCB vise. It’s a pretty clever design that’ll have you heading to Harbor Freight, or whatever the moral equivalent is in your location, where you’ll pick up a small ratcheting bar clamp. [Paul] used a 4″ (10 cm) clamp; that which looks fine for a wide range of boards, but we suppose you could go bigger if you like. You could also stop there and just clamp your PCBs in the plastic jaws, but [Paul] adorned the jaws with swiveling arms made from LEGO Technic pieces, of all things. Rubber grommets slipped onto Technic pegs go into the holes on the beam to hold the PCB edges firmly, while the swiveling action adapts to odd-shaped boards.

To our mind, the biggest advantage to this design other than cost is how low it holds the PCB — a decided advantage while working under the microscope. Don’t have any Technics parts close to hand? No worries, 3D printed parts could easily stand in, and maybe even improve the design. [Paul] also shows off a substitute for the Technics beam rendered in PCB material, which would reduce the height of the workpiece over the bench even more.

We’ve seen a lot of PCB vises come and go, using everything from scrap wood to 3D printed compliant mechanisms. But we doubt you’ll find anything more cost-effective than [Paul]’s design.

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Hackaday Links: February 4, 2024

February 4, 2024 by 20 Comments

Things may not have gone as planned last week for the flying cellphone on Mars, but just because Ingenuity‘s flying career is over doesn’t mean there’s no more work to do. NASA announced this week that it’s going to try a series of “wiggle” maneuvers on Ingenuity‘s rotors, in an attempt to get a better look at the damage to the blade tips and possibly get some clues as to what went wrong. The conjecture at the moment seems to be that a large area of relatively featureless terrain confused the navigation system, which uses down-facing cameras to track terrain features. If the navigation program couldn’t get a bead on exactly how far above the ground it was, it’s possible the copter came in too hard and caused the rotor tips to dig into the regolith. There seems to be some photographic suggestion of that, with what looks like divots in the ground about where you’d expect the rotor tips to dig in, and even scraps of material that look out of place and seem to be about the same color as the rotor blades. All this remains to be seen, of course, and we’re sure that NASA and JPL are poring over all available data to piece together what happened. As much as we hate to say goodbye to Ingenuity, we eagerly await the post-mortem.

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An unfastened piece of pipe in a drill press, rotating away

Drill Press Piece Fastening 101

April 17, 2022 by 16 Comments

What are the options you have for securing your workpiece to the drill press table? [Rex Krueger] shows us that there’s plenty, and you ought to know about them. He goes through the disadvantages of the usual C-clamps, and shows options like the regular drill press vice and a heavy-duty version that even provides a workpiece tilting mechanism, and points out small niceties like the V-grooves on the clamps helping work with round stock. For larger pieces, he recommends an underappreciated option — woodworkers’ wooden handscrew clamps, which pair surprisingly well with a drill press. Then, he talks about the hold-down drill press clamps, a favourite of his, especially when it comes to flat sheets of stock like sheet metal or plastic.

As a bonus for those of us dealing with round stock, he shows a V-block he’s made for drilling into its side, and round stock clamp, made by carefully drilling a pair of wooden hand screw clamps, for when you need to drill into a dowel from its top. The ten-minute video is a must watch for anyone not up to speed on their drill press piece fastening knowledge, and helps you improve your drilling game without having skin in it.

We’ve covered a few ingenious and unconventional drill piece fastening options before, from this wise held down by repurposed bicycle quick-release parts, to an electromagnetic wise that left our readers with mixed opinions.

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Vise Tripod Lets You Put The Tool Where You Need It

October 17, 2021 by 7 Comments

Vises are useful things for holding whatever you’re working on, but too often they’re stuck to a bench. [seamster] has experienced the glory of having a more portable solution, however, and has shared his design for a heavy duty vise tripod that provides just that.

The trick is that to be useful, the design must be heavy and stout enough to hold the vise without tipping over. For this build, [seamster] selected a fat steel pipe with 1/4″ thick walls, some solid bars and some 3/8″ thick plate. Legs and arms where then fabbed up from the bar material and welded up to form the tripod. A stout plate for the vise was then welded on top of the pipe, and the vise mounted pride of place on top.

It’s not a particularly difficult build, but it’s a smart idea that gets you a vise you can easily drag to where it’s needed. If you don’t have the vise itself, consider this hydraulic build. Meanwhile, if you’ve been whipping up your own useful workshop hacks, let us know!

Robert Murray Smith Discusses Rivets and Riveting

Old School Fastener Tutorial Is Riveting

September 10, 2021 by 18 Comments

Whether you’re making, repairing, or hacking something together, we all need fastners. Screws, nuts and bolts, and pop rivets are handy sometimes. Various resins and even hot glue are equally useful. In some cases however the right fastener for the job eludes us, and we need another trick up our sleeve.

[Robert Murray Smith] found himself in such a position. His goal was to join two pieces of aluminum that need a nice finish on both sides. Neither glue, pop rivets, screws, nuts or bolts would have been appropriate.  [Robert] is always flush with ideas both new and old, and he resorted to using an old school fastener as explained as explained in his video “How To Make And Use Rivets“.

In the video below the break, [Robert] goes into great detail about making a simple rivet die from a 5mm (3/16”) piece of flat steel, creating the rivet from a brass rod, and then using the flush rivet to join two pieces of aluminum. The simple tooling he uses makes the technique available to anybody with a propane torch, a vise, some basic tools, and a simple claw hammer. We also appreciate [Robert]’s discussion of cold riveting, hot riveting, and annealing the rivets as needed.

Not only is riveting a technique thousands of years old, its advancement and application during the Industrial Revolution enabled technologies that couldn’t have existed otherwise. Hackaday’s own [Jenny List] did a wonderful write up about rivets in 2018 that you won’t want to miss!

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