Those Versatile Vises

A vise that’s adaptable to specific needs is an invaluable piece of equipment to have at hand. At last count there were five vises, in various sizes, on or near my primary work bench. During busy times of the year, every one of these vises gets the chance to hold some part of a firearm. Quite often, several of these vises are employed simultaneously, holding various parts of one or more guns being worked on.

Various Styles If you’re just starting out in the gunrepair business, consider the purchase of a vise as one of your first investments in equipment. There are many sizes and variations of bench vises, so your first purchase should be geared toward the type of work you plan on doing the most. A large vise, made of cast iron with jaws about 5 inches wide would handle just about any type of work headed your way.

Consider a swiveling base that allows 360 degrees of rotation, and another handy feature is jaws that will rotate parallel with the floor. Most of these larger vises come equipped with pipe jaws. About the only use for these hardened, serrated jaws I’ve found is for removing shotout or rusty barrels from Mauser 98 actions when there was no need to save the barrel. The large vise should be mounted on an immobile, sturdy bench.

The one in my shop is mainly used for holding a checkering cradle firmly without any vibration being transmitted to the work. If you need to remove an action safely without damaging the barrel, the large vise will hold the barrel with some authority when pinched between aluminum blocks. The jaws on the larger vises open wide enough to hold slide-rail adjusting tools when you need to bring the rails closer together for fitting to 1911style frames. Intermediate-size bench vises have jaw widths of around 3-1/2 inches.

Here again, you’ll find most all of these vises made from cast iron, and those with swiveling bases are preferred over those with a solid, nonrotating base. This type of vise gets the most use on my bench because of its size along with the variety of sub-jaws that have proven valuable over the years. Small vises are those with jaw widths of 2 to 2-1/2 inches.

While the intermediate size vise will do everything the smaller vises will do, the smaller vises are handy to have when you need to work on tiny pins or when your larger vises are in use holding an action or frame. One small vise that comes in very handy on my bench has a base that swivels around a ball in a socket. It can be locked in place in an infinite number of work positions. The jaws hold the part securely while the base is rotated around giving the ability to get at the part from almost any angle.

The vise I prefer for working on gunstocks is an adapted patternmak-

er’s vise. Both the front and rear jaws articulate on this vise. The sub-jaws are shaped from hardwood, and will find any angle on a stock quickly. They hold the stock in a secure position without marring a wood surface, even on finished stocks. Protective Sub-Jaws We often talk about securing firearms in a vise with "protective jaws," but haven’t gotten into details on which materials offer good protection against finish damage.

I’ve tried many different types of material, such as rubber of various hardnesses, leather, hard felt, Teflon, Delrin, aluminum, brass, copper, and tool steel. Over the years, experiments with these different materials have proven which materials are most protective when working on specific parts of guns. For the patternmaker’s vise that I use mainly when working on gunstocks, the hardwood sub-jaws are faced with 1/4-inch-thick flat leather belting.

Flat leather belting material can be purchased as strips or sheets in various thicknesses and then cut with a razor knife close to the desired shape. The leather is then epoxied and clamped to the hardwood sub-jaws with the smooth side facing out and the rough side against the hardwood jaws. Once the epoxy has set up and sealed the leather face to the hardwood sub-jaws, the leather edges can be sanded flush with the hardwood jaws on a belt sander.

The leather has held fast on my patternmaker’s vise for well over 15 years, and hasn’t marred any of the gunstock surfaces I’ve worked on, including stocks that have had a finish applied. On the large 5-inch-wide vise, I made a set of removable faces that slide over and around the actual vise jaws. The base material for these jaw faces is once again hardwood, with oak or hard maple working best. Here again, leather faces are epoxied onto these "false jaws" to protect metal finishes.

Set screws go through each side of the hardwood jaw faces and into the sides of each vise jaw to allow the leather-faced jaws to swivel up and down a bit for self-alignment. The intermediate-size vise is the one I use most often, and it has several sets of replaceable jaws that can be swapped out according to the immediate need. The sub-jaws provided with most all vises have very limited use since the faces are too hard on most surfaces we need to protect.

The provided sub-jaws do make a good pattern, however, when making replacements that will serve our specific needs. The sub-jaws as provided are usually held in place with either flat-head or socket-head cap screws. Remove one of these jaws and measure the outside dimensions of the sub-jaws that came with your vise. Thickness will depend on the material used for your replacement jaws, but 3/8- to 1/2-inch-thick seems to work best. There are several different ways to make sub-jaws.

They can be held in place with the same screws used to hold the jaws that came with the vise. Or they can either slip over the original jaws or simply be held in place using the existing jaws. To make a set of screwed-in-place jaws, measure the shortest distance between the holes with the outside recording jaws on your caliper and then the diameter of one of the holes. Add the diameter of that hole to the distance as recorded between the two holes.

You should now have the center-to-center distance between the two holes and the diameter of the holes for drilling into your chosen sub-jaw material. An easier method is to use a transfer-punch that fits through the holes in the provided jaws on your vise to mark the locations for drilling. A transfer punch can be made on the lathe and then hardened to provide years of service.

The material I prefer for most subjaws is aluminum, mainly because it will not mar metal gun parts, it’s reasonably priced, and it’s easily machined. Aluminum blanks are easily adapted to hold odd-ball shapes. Pockets on opposing faces of the aluminum sub-jaws can be routed out with a ball burr-bit in a rotary tool very quickly. These pockets are then used