Low Profile Vise Design

Projects
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About to receive my new X-carve and i’ll be upgrading it to 750x1500mm size with a bunch of stiffening mods so i can handle aluminum/brass better as well.

A problem I noticed is the Z axis clearance is pretty low (65 ish), Instead of increasing the Z axis… I was hoping to have a low profile vise that i could use to accurately secure billets to but it proved very difficult to find online (for cheap at least).

I happen to have a couple 10x17x1in chunks of aluminum lying around so i figured I could make a very low profile vise once I have my X-Carve dialed in.

This is my design for a 7.5 x 10 x 1in vise (5.5 x 6 x.625in clamp area). It has an all aluminum base milled from 1" aluminum blank and includes flush mounted steel jaws as well as a tapped steel insert (for thread durability under tension) on the long 3/8-16 tightening screw.

This is designed to be able to bolt to my T-Track bed and be easily removeable for when i’m working on larger projects.

What do you guys think? Any advice or criticism? Anything is appreciated! Thank you!

Vise.PNG1722×967 517 KB

X-carve2.PNG1440×853 228 KB

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Awesome! It’s probably not the cheapest design if you have to buy your materials from scratch. it works for me since I have the aluminum already lol.

I imagine you could buy a .375 aluminum plate, mill the tracks and bolt flanges, and then just and just bolt on steel stops and jaws ontop in order to make it more economical.

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I made something like this a while back but it was a 2 piece design so that it could be used on any size material. low pro vices are nice to have around

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I recommend that your stationary jaw be a separate piece from your base plate interlocking each other, if you plan on screwing your jaw plates… Might be hard to machine those 2 holes otherwise. Second, I’d say to invest in a few more dollars and do the baseplate and your stationary jaw out of cold roll steel… Unless you don’t plan on torquing the parts too much :stuck_out_tongue:

Mat