A Vise that is operated by another Vise

[mikeswrenches]

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.

[rusty]

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

[johnsironsanctuary]

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.

[mikeswrenches]

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

[Branson]

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.

[mikeswrenches]

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

[john k]

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. 

[mikeswrenches]

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