Tool Talk
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: mikeswrenches on September 14, 2013, 05:08:31 PM
-
I ran across this at a garage sale today. The wife and I must have stopped at over 20 sales and had found nothing, then we hit this sale. While not great,it did yield some jaws for an Eifel plier-wrench in the old canvas pouch along with this strange vise, and another tool that I will post later.
The piece is marked VISE JOCKEY, reg. trade mark, U.S. Patent No. 2,595,699. The patent was issued May 6, 1952 to a Carl E. Petersen of Brooklyn, NY. It is an extremely well made piece, but I had never seen one and had no idea how it was used. I was really lucky that there was a patent no. on it. While not in DATAMP it came up quickly in Google Patents.
It is a precision vise that was designed to be held in the jaws of a regular bench vise. I tried it in a little bench vise to see how it worked. I was not impressed. It looks like a solution in search of a problem to me. Maybe that explains why they don't appear to be real common.
-
Lessee...1952-2013...so 60 years old, and it has a few barely discernable scratches in the paint....
Yup...not a major user tool ;P
Neat gadget tho
-
I actually use a vise in a vise for working on little stuff. It puts the work up higher and closer to my dirty trifocals. It is just a minivise mounted to a block of wood. I also use a mini workbench for my big vise that is a piece of 5/4 pine with a block of 2X2 screwed to the bottom. Same logic.
-
It looks like it may have been used maybe once or twice. It is not very user friendly...would definitely not be my 'go to' vise.
Mike
-
It looks like it may have been used maybe once or twice. It is not very user friendly...would definitely not be my 'go to' vise.
Mike
It doesn't look like a "go to" vise, but it does look to me like a special needs vise. It could be used like a hand vise, for one thing, and one might appreciate the angle for some jobs. And doesn't the lower jaw move to hold something that thins to one side? That's something I haven't seen on the one or two such vises like this (and the others didn't have the lugs to hold them in another vise). I like it.
-
Surprisingly I couldn't find any reference to it on the net. Maybe somebody else will have better luck.
Update: I did find a reference and a picture of one in use in a 1955 issue of Popular Science. But no reference as to maker.
Mike
-
Isn't the jaw insert rubber? If so I would imagine it would be special to hold a semi finished piece, something finished/polished on one side.
-
John, the moveable jaw is a very well machined piece of steel that, along with the tang machined on the bottom, also has a longitudinal V groove along with two transverse V grooves machined in the working face. All the intricate machining would have made this a very expensive vise. Probably prohibitively so.
It would be interesting to know what these originally cost.
Mike