Kurt knock off lifting.

hvontres said:
I would like to thank LEEQ and John Hasler for starting this therad. I decided to finaly pull the vise on my mill appart this weekend. When I got it from work, the guys told me this was an import, but after I cleared off the grime is looks like it is actually a Kurt D60 :) It feelt kinda nice to get all of that old crud out of there. Before I was getting this rust colored goo on the ways but now I just have nice clean way oil. :)

LEEQ, as far as the threads on your vise go, It looks like mine are also sharp and not ACME. My vise does have the needle bearings in front which probably helps quite a bit when tighening the vise down. As for the rear jaw not being suare, maybe you could make an aluminum soft jaw and take a cut off of the face after you mount it on the vise. If you make two, you could also mill a step in for holding thnner parts without having to mess wit paralles. And since you did the cuts with your machine, they should be fairly accurate as well. I think I will try to make a set for myself at some point, just so I don't have to mess with parallels all the time :)

Good luck, and thanks again for inspiring me to do some overdue maintainace :)

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When you are ready to look for a Kurt vise, you might want to check out the Scratch-and-Dent section on the Kurt website. It looks like you can get a pretty good discount if you are willing to live with some pinhole porosity in the vise. They also have some more interesting items, like 400mm toombstones with a corner banged up... wonder how that happend :)
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Congrats on the hidden Kurt find! How cool. I checked out the scratch and dent, have my eye on a 688. 6" vise opens 8.8". Can't afford one just yet though.
 
hvontres said:
When you are ready to look for a Kurt vise, you might want to check out the Scratch-and-Dent section on the Kurt website. It looks like you can get a pretty good discount if you are willing to live with some pinhole porosity in the vise. They also have some more interesting items, like 400mm toombstones with a corner banged up... wonder how that happend :)
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Hehehe!
The guy who dropped it on his feet now is selected for the Kurt Swim Team: fins give him a great advantage :biggrin:
The photo (huge!) is here: http://www.kurtworkholding.com/images/2014/TB4C40606SD.JPG and price is here: http://www.kurtworkholding.com/cast-iron-face-base-p-3238-l-en.html
It is funny they used a felt-tip to add the arrow directly over the tombstone, rather than adding it over the image with PhotoShop…
 
I am surprised that Kurt would even sell a product that was not perfect. It still has their name on it doesn't it? I can understand a dented corner,but POROSITY,you saw??? That would be MUCH different,indeed.
 
LEEQ said:
Well, I do see a Kurt in my future, just don't know how far off. Spending so much hobby time (that I have little of) fixing new Chinese crap is getting old. I like my Indian made rotary table/ dividing set. I like my Tormach and Bostar (Chinese) qctp's . Those tools took the least work and work well now.The other stuff is pretty buggy. My little Grizzly lathe purchased new included. As for what I have in the mean time, I dug into it a bit today and found it does have the half ball and it is stuck into the proper place with grease and tensioned. I don't know about lift or not as I put it to work clamping a slice of cold rolled for facing. It wound up parallel, but not square to the sides. I used a piece off copper wire between it and the moving jaw which allowed me to seat it down tight to the parallels. Without this, the unsquare sides tipped the whole piece as it was clamped. I can understand that. I'll probably use work arounds until I get stumped and have to get deeper into it. I wouldn't recommend buying one. I don't know about accuracy of grinding, but I do know it has weird pointed threads, not Acme. It seems to lack thrust bearings, and came to me with the half ball loose inside instead of sitting where it goes. The casting is thin and full of holes. It has been lifting on me too. Overall pretty crappy. I got what I paid for. I hate to buy used unseen, new Chinese was crap, unless someone can point me to a high quality knock off, I think my options are new high end stuff. The Glacern stuff seems on par price wise with Kurt. Guess I'll make that call when I can afford one.
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I would agree that that would be a good call. I lucked into Glacern's 4th of July Blowout Sale and was able to get their 6" CNC Machinist's vice for 1/2 price @ $572 to the door and they included the keys to auto parallel it with the bed.(Normally $49.99) They work great. I've moved it several times and indicated it and it's been spot on each time. I know there are different schools of thought on these but I'm growing to like them. A day or so after I'd already ordered the Glacern Enco had the 6" Kurt on sale for 1/2 price w/free shipping. They came within a couple of dollars of each other. The keys would have been extra for the Kurt. I'm very pleased to have a Top-0-The-Line vice. Makes me wonder how folks can put up with the crappy China stuff then I remember why I did. I couldn't afford the good stuff. I just happened to have a really, really good week at the shop that week and pulled the trigger before I talked myself out of it.

I would have known nothing about it if Marco B. hadn't posted about them in thread that was going on at the time.

Thanks Marco!
 
drs23 said:
Makes me wonder how folks can put up with the crappy China stuff then I remember why I did. I couldn't afford the good stuff. I just happened to have a really, really good week at the shop that week and pulled the trigger before I talked myself out of it.

I would have known nothing about it if Marco B. hadn't posted about them in thread that was going on at the time.

Thanks Marco!
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You're welcome!
About the price of the good stuff, I've seen somewhere a fancy diagram explaining how to calculate the shelf price of a product, but now I'm unable to find it.
Anyway this diagram explained the workshop cost is made for the 50% by materials and for the 50% by wages (e.g. $100 = $50 for the iron and $50 for the blacksmith).
The wholesale guy double this price: $200.
The distributor double the wholesale price: $400.
The shop double the distributor price: $800.
And the diagram stops here, with everybody happy to become rich.
But if the blacksmith wages are reduced below those of a Chinese rice picker, according to that diagram the incidence of this on the shelf price is minimal:
- workshop cost: $55 ($50 for the iron and $5 for the starving blacksmith)
- wholesale: $110
- distributor: $220
- shop: $440
At this point the shop price is dropped of just about 45%, while the blacksmith wages are dropped about 90% and he could no more afford to buy good things, having to resort to Chinese stuff (and food stamps).
If you find these calculations "unrealistic", I can told you some years ago my friend growing sweet basil (I wrote about him into another post) was paid 0.25 euro for each huge bunch of basil 6" wide, while the same bunch was sold in Genoa, at the Euroflora fair, for 10 euro.
Here is why, if possible, I try to buy directly from producers (even apples!) or following the shortest chain available.
 
Marco writes: About the price of the good stuff, I've seen somewhere a fancy diagram explaining how to calculate the shelf price of a product, but now I'm unable to find it.
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The old marketing rule of thumb for consumer products was that retail price needed to be nine times material cost but that was never really very useful. Kurt doesn't need to account for the high cost of a good retail location, spoilage, or the risk that their product will be out of fashion by the time it reaches the market. On the other hand, they are selling a relatively low-volume product that requires expensive capital to make.
 
John Hasler said:
The old marketing rule of thumb for consumer products was that retail price needed to be nine times material cost but that was never really very useful. Kurt doesn't need to account for the high cost of a good retail location, spoilage, or the risk that their product will be out of fashion by the time it reaches the market. On the other hand, they are selling a relatively low-volume product that requires expensive capital to make.
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Exactly!
But also Kurt, as any other maker of high quality products, needs very skilled workers, guys who don't bore through a drill press table just because they are tired/bored or because they don't have any experience.
To have skilled workers means to invest heavily in training: a boy who just left the school can't know all the subtleties of a workshop, even if he can drive a CNC machine but, as everybody here knows, a CNC machine can't do everything (maybe it could… but for an astronomic cost).
Until the Kurt shareholders (but also those of Glacern, Orange and a few others brands) will not be attained by the "make money fast" fever, delocalizing jobs to just apparently save money, they can have a lot of profit from the existing resources (good machines and skilled workers), even if this will be a long-term investment.
 
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