# Drill press vise on steroids



## Marco Bernardini (May 15, 2014)

In 2009, when I bought my 50 euro drill press, I also bought a 9.90 euro drill press vise.
Here it is when it was still "virgin":




and here it is now:




The first thing I made was to add a plate below the moving jaw, to reduce the ± 30° rocking.
The second was to remove that bulky knurled handle (soon or later I'll replace the nail with something else).
Of course the vise slots didn't fit with the table slots: importers of cheap things don't waste their time in these details.
After seeing some YouTube videos I decided it would be nice to have a vise which can be moved almost freely under the chuck, but all the XY vises I've seen were bulky and expensive.
And here began the tale of my vise on steroids.
Since I don't know how to weld, I asked a "gate maker" (to define him "blacksmith" would denigrate the blacksmiths category) to weld a couple of L profiles below an iron plate, to surround the sides of the drill table:




In this way the table can move on the Y axis. The M6 bolts on the sides are to stop it.
On the upper side of the plate there are some iron bars welded to create a sort of T slots:




I used long sliding bars instead of simple T-nuts to reduce the backslash (gate makers "high" precision is in tenths of centimeters… i.e. mm), with cap screws to bolt the vise. The end of the screws is slotted (with a hacksaw) to turn them with a screwdriver from the top rather than to move them outside the slot to use an Allen key from the bottom.
The vise is then bolted on the top:




If I need to move it on the X axis all I have to do is to unlock a bits the nuts (not shown in the photo above).
It's not a perfect solution, it's not even dead square, but it's *thin* (and *free*!), and it allows me to move a piece under the chuck until I find the right spot to drill.
Some days ago my friends at the stevedores cooperative gave me a piece of iron plate 5 mm thick, and I decided to use it to add some swivel to my vise.
Half of the plate went on the bottom:




I added a round of my usual plastic (the one I used for my garden LED lamp) as support for the swiveling top, to give enough clearance for the X bolts which I don't want to cut, just in case I have to place again the vise on them.
I know the plastic is not exactly in the middle, but I recycled a couple of holes there were on the plate.
Inside the plastic there is an M5 locking nut, so the plastic can turn if I don't keep the nut too tight.
Over the plastic I screwed the other half plate, with bolts to keep the vise:




Please notice the precision of the three holes: the sum of the angles of the triangle is exactly 180°!!! :lmao:
At last, the vise gets its place:




I made a hole in the top plate, to have the space to tighten/loosen the axle bolt with a T key:




And here is the vise mounted on the drill press:




As you can see, the chip tray I made is pretty useful.
But… but… there is a problem!
The bolts I used are higher than the vise!
No problem! An HSS slitting saw (almost new: "Made in Czechoslovakia"…) made my day:





And now I have an (almost) "rotary table" :lmao:
What next?
A gear to make it indexable?
Step motors?
Uhmmm…


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