Heavy Duty Table Vice (8")

Name: Heavy Duty Table Vice (8")
Brand: Harden
SKU: 600613

Item No. 600613

Price on request

Eight inches is the largest bench vice in the range and it is bought for heavy work and for a particular reason beyond jaw width: at this size the vice becomes a piece of workshop equipment rather than a bench accessory. It grips large section, heavy plate, big pipe and shafting, axle and suspension components, and industrial castings, and it holds them through operations that would tear a smaller vice off its bench.

That is the thing to understand before buying one. An eight inch vice is very often used as an anchor point rather than simply as a holder — for bending bar, straightening heavy sections, pressing and driving out seized pins and bushes, breaking large threaded joints free, and holding work through hammer blows that need to land hard. All of those apply forces measured in hundreds of kilograms, applied at the end of a long lever, and the vice has to absorb them without shifting, flexing or breaking.

Cast steel is what makes that reasonable. Cast iron is stiff and cheap and it is what most vices are made from, but it is brittle, and brittleness under this class of load is genuinely dangerous — a cast iron vice failing at the slide or the base under a man on a lever fails instantly and throws pieces. Cast steel is tough: it will deform and stay in one piece. On a tool that is deliberately used as an anchor for heavy leverage, that is the specification that matters most.

The buyers are heavy fabrication and structural steel shops, commercial vehicle, bus and plant workshops, marine and generator engineering, plantation and factory maintenance departments, and railway and industrial engineering. Hardware dealers supply this size on order rather than from the shelf.

The bench is as important as the vice. An eight inch vice needs a heavy bench — a steel frame, or timber with a steel top plate — bolted or braced to the floor or the wall, and the vice bolted through with every hole used and a spreader plate underneath. Anything less and the first heavy job will pull the fixings through the bench top. Set the jaws overhanging the front edge so long material hangs clear, and set the height for the work: a large vice is usually mounted a little lower than a small one, because you are more often applying force downwards than filing precisely.

Maintenance is simple and repays itself. Grease the screw and slide, keep swarf out, and re-check the mounting bolts regularly because heavy use works them loose. Soft liners on anything finished, machined or threaded. Hammer on the anvil pad rather than the jaw tops. Message us on WhatsApp with the kind of work you have in mind and we will tell you whether this or the 6" is the sensible buy.