Thinking out loud again

[oldgoaly]

I have this Wilton pattern makers vise, it's missing a steel jaw. Not really interested in having the steel jaw. Thinking of casting a set of lead or lead alloy jaws. I have lead sheet I slip over another vises jaws  as a lead / soft jaws.
Is there any reason lead would not work? Don't want to over look a problem waiting to happen.
Not interested in plastic jaws, other end is wood. Over thinking this while the clay bakes in oven for a lid that will be poured in pewter in the future.
Jaw is 4" long, 1" wide and a little over 1/4" thick

[jdjax]

I plan on doing this myself one of these days and I have some linotype lead [which has more antimony in it making it harder] that I plan on adding to my soft [pure] lead maybe 50\50 mix. If you have extra pewter you could try adding that to lead because it has more tin in it which will make it a little bit harder but if you add too much you might get an alloy that will tend to crumble.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/10-Pounds-of-Linotype-for-Reloading-Sinkers-Fishing-Weights/173266151826?hash=item285777a992:g:pUQAAOSwe0NZ0cSO

[mikeswrenches]

The only problem might be the lead marking the wood, it’s pretty soft. Might not matter as long as you don’t drag the wood against it. Why not just make a wood jaw?

Mike

[EVILDR235]

I used some soft copper to make soft jaws for my vise. The copper jaws are attached with double sided tape. I have three Craftsman vises I use at the moment and the copper jaws always stay on the one vise. I also have some lead sheet material used for roof flashing that I can also use.

EvilDr235

[oldgoaly]

Got some antimony ingots somewhere?
The opposite end has wood jaws
Yes copper would be interesting, got a bunch of old wire and tube. Haven't poured copper, heard others say copper is hard to pour with out a secondary metal to alloy.

[Lewill2]

I made a set of brass jaw inserts for my 5 inch Wilton Bullet vise the inserts are drilled to fit my 5 inch Craftsman vise too. I made a set of UHMW plastic ones too but I don't like them as much because they are to slippery to keep items held in place.

[turnnut]

 how about wood with thick rubber glues to it ?  you could drill holes in the rubber to get at the screws.

[wvtools]

I wonder if Babbitt would work.  It has 4 to 17.5% antimony, depending on the grade (see Wikipedia for %).  I did not realize how much tin and how little lead was in Babbitt.  The ingots are pretty readily available on Ebay, although they are a bit pricey.  I have had pretty good luck selling mine on there.

[oldgoaly]

Got some babbit ingots too, grading/content papers are with them.
oh wait I have 2 mystery ingots, I was melting lead pipe I had been collecting and was getting near the end. Added something that was not lead, pot started to solidify, turned up the heat and scraped all of it into the ingot molds. The stuff is heavy like lead and hard like a brass or harder.  1st pic, 2nd is old pic of aluminum ingots last count we were up over 700 pounds, lead was in the same range, but made lead hammers 6# and 3#.