A great microscopy diamond setting vise for a few hours work

phil

Elite Cafe Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2007
Messages
224
Location
England
For those of you that set under a microscope you may have experienced the problems that I have, unless you have a scope with a good depth of field capability.

Firstly: when using a grs block or microblock this happens.

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The work is level and in focus then when you want to cut a bearing in a claw/prong or channel, as the vise is tilted, the work drops by 3/4 of an inch or more and the image is no longer in focus.

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Well...... I stumbled across a nice easy solution to this. With this vise this happens.

Work is in focus
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Vise tilted to 45 degrees to cut a claw/prong or channel bearing and everything is still in focus

IMAG0822.jpg

With a spherical vise, as it tilts the height immediately starts reducing. With a flat on the bottom and a slight champher, the homemade vise when tilted is still at the same height as when straight. This has saved me hours of time by not doing the small focussing adjustments that I had to before.

I am by no means a woodworker but here is how I made it.

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Cut some wood into even pieces unless you have a larger piece to use.

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Glue and clamp them together.

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Do a little turning making sure to leave a flat on the bottom. This also means you dont have to use a ring as its freestanding.
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Do some digging out with a pendant drill or big flat graver to make a cavity for an inside ring holder and epoxy into place.

Works really well and is alot cheaper than a microblock with no refocussing issues. I hope this helps someone out.:thumbsup:
 

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Terrezar

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Apr 6, 2013
Messages
139
Location
Toten, Norway
Great idea! I like the idea of having an own kind of vice for rings, and I also realy like making my own tools. I guess it works almoust like a low profile vice, keeping the work in focus as the base is tilted.
 

mrthe

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Joined
Oct 20, 2010
Messages
1,787
Location
Spain
Nice idea, just a suggestion to fix the ring holder you can use a bit ot thermo loc instead the epoxy, in this way if you want you can pull off it when you need use it in ither vise in a easy way
 

monk

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Feb 11, 2007
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washington, pa
what are the dimensions of the wood ball ? i'd like to give this a try.
 

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