Free Vice Soft Jaw Generator
Free vice soft jaw generator. Bore, vee, profile or stepped seats cut to the part you hold, slip-over, magnet or bolt-on, rigid or flexible.
What It Does
A steel vice holds anything and marks most of it. Soft jaws are the answer, and printed ones are better than the generic aluminium sort because they can carry a seat cut to the exact part being held, which spreads the clamping load instead of concentrating it on two lines of contact. This generator makes a matched pair to your vice, live in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Designing is free; we print the pair and courier them anywhere in New Zealand.
Getting Them Onto The Vice
Slip-over jaws hook over the top of the existing steel jaws and need nothing but the thickness of your vice jaw and a little clearance; a return lip on the back stops them lifting off as the vice opens. Keep the hook at 4 mm or more, because a thinner one snaps the first time it is knocked. Magnet jaws sit on the steel with countersunk magnet pockets and are the quickest to swap. Bolt-on jaws use the tapped holes your vice already has, with counterbores so nothing stands proud of the face.
The Seat
A bore holds round work of one diameter: seatposts, handlebars, steerer tubes, fork stanchions, thru axles, crank spindles. Two further stations can be stacked above it at different diameters, so one pair of jaws covers three sizes without being swapped. A vee seat holds any diameter over a range and self-centres, which is what you want when the sizes vary. A profile seat cuts the shape of a square, rectangular, hex, oval, D-section or T-slot extrusion into the jaw, or your own outline typed in as points. A flat seat is a plain jaw with no seat at all, which is still worth printing simply to stop the steel marking the work. The lead-in chamfer around the mouth of a cavity is worth keeping: it guides the part in and stops the cavity edge from biting.
Rigid Or Flexible
A rigid jaw is cut a fraction larger than the part and holds it by clamping force. A flexible jaw is cut slightly under and deforms onto the part, gripping over the whole seat rather than at its edges, which is what you want for anything thin-walled or already finished. A flexible jaw needs its compliance slots turned on to work at all: without somewhere to give, a flexible jaw grips like a brick. Choose the flexible type here and then TPU when you quote it.
Details That Matter
Horizontal grip ribs across the face add friction on a smooth part. The perimeter chamfer keeps the jaw edges from digging in and is trimmed automatically if the jaw is too small to carry the size you asked for. Watch the plate thickness against a bore: a bore cut more than halfway through a thin plate breaks out of the back, and the tool says so and names the thickness that would fix it.