Mini Bench Vice (70)

Two features on the specification lift this above a basic small vice. The first is that the jaws are hardened and tempered. A soft jaw picks up dents and burrs from every hard workpiece it grips, and once the faces are damaged nothing sits flat in them again. Hardening makes the faces resist that; tempering afterwards takes the brittleness back out so they do not chip. It is the same treatment given to good hand tools and it is the difference between a vice that still grips properly in five years and one that has been chewed smooth.

The second is the swivel base with an anvil. The swivel lets you rotate the work to a comfortable angle and lock it there instead of contorting yourself around a fixed vice, which matters a great deal on close bench work where the angle you can see from and the angle you can file from are rarely the same. The anvil is a small flat pad cast into the body behind the jaws, and its purpose is to give you somewhere legitimate to hit things. That is not a trivial addition — hammering on the jaws or the slide of a vice is the commonest way they get wrecked, and having a proper surface a few inches away stops it happening.

The body is cast iron, the traditional material for vices: extremely stiff, dimensionally stable, and good at damping the vibration that would otherwise chatter through a workpiece while you are filing or sawing it.

The buyers are electricians and technicians, appliance and instrument repairers, model makers, locksmiths, jewellers and light engineering benches, plus households and small workshops wanting a real vice without a full-size one.

Bolt it down solidly, because everything a vice does depends on it not moving. Use soft jaw liners on plated, polished or soft components even with hardened jaws — hard, well-cut jaws mark work more, not less. Tighten by hand and never with a bar on the handle. And use the anvil for hammering, not the jaws. Message us on WhatsApp for a price, or for a comparison with the 50mm vice if space is very tight.