Thread: Milling vice rehab

More years ago than I care to rememeber I picked up a 3 way tilting milling vice , it had been used in aplumbers workshop for a drill vice and had some pretty nasty things done to it.
I never had a mill at the time and never thought I would ever get one , but I kept the vice , in my garden shed for many years .After I built a decent shed and decided to have a workshop where I could spend my time engaged in woodwork and limited metal work .
Then I was fortunate enough to get my hands on a milling machine ,nothing fancy , but hey it was free.
I decided that the vice that was buried under the junk and crap in the garden shed ,would be ok for my mill.
Not having seen it for a long time I had forgotten about the butchery that the vice had suffered.
I have been it using for a couple of years in its butchered state ,but was fast becoming sick and tired of having to muck about getting items levelled in the vice for machining.
So this weekend I decided to do some thing about the butchery .
I machined out the butchered throat and turned up a plug to fill a drill hole on the edge of the cut out where I am fitting the new throat insert.
I didn't want to go too far back as the rails under the vice start to get a bit thin .

I machined a lump of hot rolled flat bar to fit into the cut out and made it a tap in fit , I had to hand fit it so it was a nice fit.
Then I marked and machined the dovetailed sides.
I meant to make the sides a bit longer so they were proud of the sides and I was going to machine them off level with the originals .
But I went a tad over so I adjusted them by machining a bit off the bottom of the insert which brought them down and out about .005 " short of matching up .I still have to fix the insert in and I could take a poofteenth of the bottom to bring the dovetails level.
Im thinking of fixing it with csk socket caps ,I have a few 5mm ones .
I'm going to put some devcon liquid steel under it to fill any slight voids in the bed. Still a couple of drill divots in there but nothing I can't live with .
Once I get the insert secured with screws I'll take a finishing cut over the whole throat to level it all off.

Kev.