How GOOD or BAD is a $100 Milling Vice? 

Whatever we think of inexpensive Asian machine tool products, we need to realize that their low cost often means the difference between being able to enjoy having a hobby machine shop and not. You have to accept a certain amount of quality variability, lack of finish and cleanliness - then adapt and overcome. It’s sort of like getting 80% of the needed qualities for 20% of the price. I offer that if we could see the facilities where some of these products were manufactured we’d be amazed that they are as good as they are.

You provide great content for a hobbyist or someone just starting metal work. Thank you.

You couldn’t buy the material for $100

I have the 5” Vevor vice. As a hobbyist, considering the price, it is quite satisfactory. It needed complete deburring, which given my experience with inexpensive tools and equipment, was no surprise. Although I’m using the vice, as is, with no problem, one of my future projects is to scrape the bottom flat, and surface grind the ways and parts. It will be an interesting experiment to see if I can turn a cheap vise into a good, used Kurt vice.

You should have shown the perpendicularity of the stationary jaw! I had an import 4" vise very similar to this that had a whopping .017" out-of-squareness on the stationary jaw from top to bottom (about 1-1/8"), brand new. I immediately returned it, and bought a Kurt DX4. It was about 6 times as much money as the import, but I have zero regrets.

You spoil us with so many videos in a week!

Good fair honest review. 👍 Thanks for sharing.

I have the vevor 6" super happy with it .

You get what you pay for. A couple thou off for $100? I dont think it's all that bad. I feel it all boils down to an individuals desire for Fair, Good, Better, Best, or just downright DROP DEAD PERFECT accuracy! And - just how deep your pockets are.😊 . Buy once, cry once as a friend has told me in the past. Thanks for another great video and more knowledge.

Nice video man, keep it up...

Thanks for the interesting review. A couple hours on a good surface grinder could transform the little vise into an accurate and usable shop tool.

I think you did a very clean and honest review on this device, it's not to shabby for home/ hobby shop. The material is fairly good, where these fail is because they have to be churned out in great numbers to about 60/70 % quality finish to sell at this price.

I came to the same conclusion regarding their 8" version with rotating base that was dirt cheap a couple of years ago, that they are great for a drill press but not so good for heavy milling. I found the base was square enough but the sliding jaw had to be refit and the half ball jaw hold down and pocket needed to be polished to work. These vises seem to be good enough for light machining after some clean up. I have been poking around looking at used Kurt CNC style vises, the prices and shipping are very high but I want to use one on a 5hp mill...Good video!

Showin off with that jig bore style Interapid!! I have a couple interapid .0001 test indicators, but couldnt swing for the vertical haha.

Looks like an excellent vice for the drill press or the bench. Thanks.

Loved the interapid moments I tuck mine in at night and check on them to make sure they are ok

Even though there are a few videos on the 5 inch vice already I think it's important to show either the consistency or inconsistency of the production over the years. Thank you for the video

Thanks for sharing! If one had tons of time AND patience, it might be worth hand scraping this thing into tighter tolerances. Maybe...... That'd be a lot of scraping. Thanks again! 😊

Thx for the vid.

Good review mate top marks for judging it based on price.

Let's see how vertical that fixed jaw is.

Bought one of these about 2 years ago, discrepancies similar to yours, scraped the base and the main rails flat, fixed jaw was at right angles OK, rebuilt it, and machined a square test piece in it with no problem, the only thing I have against it is that the material is very soft, and easily marked, as you probably know the moving jaw is held down as well as forward as it is tightened, I copied a a Kurt tip, and machined the bottom of the moving jaw near the front for 2x 12mm O rings, left them sticking proud about 0.012" so that the jaw sits on them, you can then pull these down with the small adjusting screw till you have about 3 to 4 thou gap with the jaw loose, when you tighten something in, the jaw actually moves down as well as forward, and pulls the part onto your parallels, no need for hammering.

Got the 4 inch version. Scraping the bottom flat fixed the main ways to within a few 10ths. Haven't managed to completely stop the moving jaw from lifting up as it tightens yet...

Hey quick question, what for turning tool are you using in your short video of turning stainless steel? I'd like to try one of those...

First ! great vid. thanks because newcomers are usually short on cash for the good stuff.

You're a funny man. I like you, funny man. Keep bein' funny, man. Have a lovely day

I just had my big, 1950's era (36x24x4) surface plate checked and lapped to a B almost an A, I just bought a import little 12x9 surface plate off of Amazon for $62, as a curtsy they offered to check it, came out as also a B grade bordering an A, even they were surprised as to how flat it was. I also drilled a hole through it with a Milwaukee diamond 3/4 hole saw, using my big drill press and a lot of water, cut like butter and through bolted a 14" x1" ground rod, I'm building a dedicated height comparator.

Good as a raw casting. If you have a 6X18 surface grinder you can bring it within 2 tenths which is something I'm inclined to do

It's in line with what I saw on my 6" chuck from vevor, seems fine until you check the detail and see that finish is not great, but in the end it's usable and darn cheap. But I will change it by a better one in the future...

To me those cheap tools are more to tinker, learn and customize for specific use than a ready-to-use solution. They are cheaper than a raw cast piece with 80% of the job done already. With a bit of work and tuning they can work really close to the finished 5 times more expensive ones.

Thanks for the video, I know this takes a ton of time to produce so I hope you take the critique as trying to help. You need to research cosine error, you have your indicator setup wrong. Also, most important things to measure in a vise are clamping force and perpendicularity particularly when clamping something. The latter is pretty easy to measure, just clamp something and measure how far it deflects as you tighten the vise. the former is likely just apparent by the lack of thrust bearing on the screw. for most in this price range (who don't have a surface plate) this vise is better than they can measure.

ive a vevor 5" & 6" vice from 15 months ago and while they are no kurt, they are both much better than your friday vice. ALL my brite bits, jaws, slideways etc are ground and not a single tool mark can be seen even when disassembled. I notice yours even omitted the thrust bearing in the screw and even the oiler, both mine have this. At least one of mine had sand up where the 1/2 ball is... I washed moth together amd the solvent was crunchy after that area.

Could be interesting to rework from the bottom up, and see if it can bi improved with minimal effort.

I started 20 years ago paid 350.00 for the shars 8". I was really ok with it work as I expected. Last summer at a car show/swap meet, I spotted a kirt box, took a look and yap brand new inquired about the price. Guys like would 100.00 be two much, I couldn't get my wallet out fast enough. So I thought the shars vice was a good unit until I kirt got mounted. Huge difference, moral of the story,NAA just wanted to brag about my brand new in the freaking box kirt 8" for a 100 bucks. Sometimes even a blind squirrel finds a nut.

Yes it's a good test on the surface plate, but fwiw those are static no load tests. There's checks that should be run under what the vise will see during the dynamic loads when it's being used. Your Tegara mill vise should be pretty good, so an apples to apples comparison can be made. I learned the hard way after buying a couple of at the time $250 4" mill vises that the tests need to go a bit further. If you've got a torque wrench, set up that vise beside yours on the mill table and bolt it down. Then set up your dti behind and towards the top of the fixed jaw. Use parallels and hold something that's known to be square and flat towards the top of the vise jaws. Then use the torque wrench to apply the same torque on the screw for each vise. Measure just how much rear jaw deflection your seeing between both of them verses the torque numbers your using. It's not a perfect test unless you can also measure the jaw closing force with something like a load cell that would also indicate how well the screw and nut are made and there efficiency and how much actual load is being applied to that rear jaw. But it would still be a good indicator of what's really happening within the vise for bed and jaw deflection which is extremely important. Funny enough those 4" vises I bought did check out a whole lot better than what you found. And the surface grinding was in fact fairly decently done. What can't be seen is the parent metal, casting quality and the castings integrity under the paint. I also had to machine the wedge the half ball rides against to prevent jaw lift since mine were left as cast. And both of mine weren't much tougher than hard chezze since each vise even when bolted down were seriously bending and deflecting both the vise bed and rear jaw under moderate closing pressures of about 30-40 ft. lbs. On one vise I was seeing over .010" jaw deflection and over .003" on the bed in front of the fixed jaw. As actual milling vises, they were just about worthless unless I was willing to shim everything to help compensate. And deviations like that makes using the hand wheel dials or a good dro and part coordinates vary by a whole lot. I finally replaced them with a matched pair of Glacern 615's. So I first had to waste just about $500 before I learned a tough lesson. What the vise is really cast from and how much bondo is under the paint is just as important as how it measures on a surface plate. Like you said, at best mine would be I guess ok or at least good enough on something like a drill press. But if I want accurate, all my drilling gets done in the mill anyway.

Do the same test with your kurt on the same surface plate

If you have access to a surface grinder all those issues can be resolved in less than an hour. Disassembly and reassemble most likely would take longer than grinding.

What is that noise in the back ground. And that is noticeable with only the speakers on my device .

Hrm, it looked like there could have been a lot of cosine error with the indicator angle on the jaw? Might have made it look worse than it is?

So like all cheap stuff like this, consider it a raw casting kit. Some disassembly, surface grinding, and reassembly, and a few better parts required

I got the 5" for like $50 on sale... Really wish I would have bought 2. It's... ok. It's as good as I need for my baby PM mill. The handle is T.R.A.S.H.

You don't expect super precision for a hundred bucks. As long as the stationary jaw can be tramed in square and the clamping force is equal across the jaws, you can get very satisfactory parts. Finish is not the final word. I would take function over a polished surface any day. I would have liked to have seen it mounted on a mill table and an indicator run up and down and across the face and top of the fixed jaw.

So the Discrepancy in the vice is probably the equivalent to the amount of rice the person who made the vice take home .

Put a sheet of wet& dry face up on a flat surface and give yourself a workout sliding the vice around on it. With the base flat you might find the other measurements improve.

Still, this is a strange approach to measuring a vice. Your starting point in measuring is the guides, and it was necessary to support the guides on the surface plate and measure the base. And so we only know that the base is crooked... and nothing more.

Even the Chinese got it spelled wrong on the box

Hell can't beat it for $100

But wouldn’t that be a really good advice to get and practice by cleaning it up you know with your mill ?

There is a point or practicality, all this $100 vise can be repaired, improved with a bit of sweat equity, maybe not the kind of vise you want for a beginner tho, Im not a machinist or an engineer, so I wouldn't even know to check this sort of thing, js

What's sad is Vevor likely selected this vise specifically for a review, so they checked it out before sending it out and thought "Yeah, this vise right here? She's going to get a good review", so you know that one of these that the normal person is going to get will be far worse quality. In fact, I can confirm that what the normal person gets is far worse quality. I made the mistake of buying one of these when I was starting my adventures in machining. The ways and the bottom of the vise were completely out of parallel, which makes it entirely useless as a vise. The ways were even more slanted than what you ended up receiving, again, making it entirely useless as a vise. I've seen some other people have "acceptable" results scraping in the surfaces, but that's an arduous process that requires way more patience than I personally have. I ended up saving up for a Kurt, and it's been a night and day difference. Even with my import bench mill, which has its own rigidity problems, I can actually square stock fairly reliably. Obviously, not everyone can afford a Kurt, but it's amazing how much of a difference a quality vise can make in the greater scheme of things.

I bought a $100 china cnc vice. Nothing was true, straight, or square. After grinding it in, it became usable. After that, I bought a Kurt DX4 and a DX6, money well spent. Buy once, cry once. I wouldn't even use these for drill press vices.

If you have a surface grinder and some time, this seems like a bargain

👍👍😎👍👍

I’ll file this under good enough for the girls I go with .

Well it looks like and opportunity to learn how to scrape in subsurfaces really not that hard. I see nothing here you can overcome with a little bluing, a Amazon scrapper, and marble flat 🧐 Good luck doing this in your next show

Vise is spelled v-i-s-e. Vice isn't a clamping device.

How come my $100.00 Chinese vise doesn’t compare to my $800.00 Kurt vise ? I really don’t understand.

If I could buy even a used Kurt vice for $500 or $600 then I surely would. Here downunder, a new 6 inch Kurt vice is more like $6000🇦🇺 of our sh!tsvillian pacific micro pesos. That’s due to completely screwed up US Postal charges, and conversion rate of $US to $Aud and on top of that our Government adding a further 10% GST (Goods & Services Tax) on top of that price when it arrives to go through customs. So a new Kurt vice here costs more than a good used Bridgeport Mill second hand ffs. Most of it is the freight cost. We are supposed to have a “free trade agreement” signed with USA but the US Government is using ludicrous postal charges as de facto trade tariff barrier. God knows why because it’s only hurting US Manufacturers. 🙄👎 So we all buy cheap Chinese crap milling vices like Vertex or Vevor etc because the only alternative from USA must be made from that rare earth “unobtainium” based on what they cost. If you can’t fix your postal issues well forget trying to grow your business by exporting anything outside the US Lower 48

🤣

It doesn't make sense how it can be that cheap... the shipping alone is over $100, the material to make that is over $100. This vevor stuff doesn't compute.

VISE not vice for God’s sake

First thing you need to do is to learn the difference between Vice and VISE. DUH!

If you have a surface grinder that can accommodate that base (and can get those keys out!), it's quite fixable. The perpendicularity of the fixed jaw might be more difficult. $100 is pretty good