Heavy Duty Table Vice (3")

It is a cast steel bench vice, and that specification is the reason to prefer it over the many cheap vices that look similar. The great majority of inexpensive bench vices are cast iron, and cast iron has one serious weakness in this application: it is brittle. A vice lives a hard life — it gets hammered on, levered against, over-tightened and dropped, and cast iron responds to that by cracking, usually through the slide or at the base. Cast steel is far tougher and will bend and take a set before it breaks, which on a tool that is bolted to a bench and worked against every day is worth a great deal.

What a bench vice actually gives you is a third hand that does not move, and that is the whole point of it. Almost every hand operation in a workshop — filing, sawing, tapping a thread, chiselling, deburring, bending, straightening, driving a pin out — is impossible to do accurately while also holding the work. The accuracy of everything done at a bench is set by how well the vice holds, which is why it is worth buying a good one once.

The buyers are general workshops and maintenance departments, electricians and plumbers with a bench, motorcycle and small engine repairers, hobby and home workshops, and hardware dealers selling to households and small trades. Three inches is the size that goes onto a domestic or light commercial bench.

Mount it properly and it will outlast everything around it. Bolt it through the bench with all the mounting holes used and washers underneath, positioned so the jaws sit at or just past the front edge — that way long work can hang down past the bench rather than being held at an angle. Set the height so the top of the jaws is about at your elbow when standing, which is where filing is most controllable.

Use soft jaw covers on anything finished, plated, threaded or soft. The serrations that make a vice grip steel will destroy a thread or a polished surface in one squeeze. Tighten by hand and never with a bar or a pipe on the handle, since that is how the screw gets bent and the jaws pulled out of parallel. Keep the screw and slide clean and greased, and use the anvil surface rather than the jaws for hammering. Ask us on WhatsApp for a price on this or on the larger sizes.