Cross Sliding Vise on Hollow Chisel Mortiser
lauriamc
| Posted in General Discussion on
In the current issue of FWW there is a workshop tip that advises adding a cross sliding vise to a benchtop hollow chisel mortiser in order to gain X and Y table mobility. Almost all cross sliding vises today that I have seen are made in China and reviews often complain of them having a ton of slop and rough movement. Would that make them difficult to use for a mortiser as it would effect the squareness of the mortise? Does anyone know of any good new cross sliding vises? In theory this is a great idea, but unless the vise is well made I feel like it would create more problems than it claims to fix.
Replies
Do you currently have a hollow chisel mortiser?
I had a benchtop mortiser, a Delta, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. It was complete crap, and fell apart, once piece at a time. I never tried adding a cross slide vise.
I replaced the Delta with a Powermatic floor model with the X Y table, and it's wonderful. It's a great mortiser, and the sliding table makes a huge difference.
So, if you don't already have the mortiser, get one with the sliding vise built in.
Makes no sense to me on a number of levels.
I also have the floor standing Powermatic which is a solid machine.
For a bench top model the Rikon looks to be a good choice, it has a nice clamp and X/Y dovetail slides and a fraction of the price of the Powermatic.
The Woodsmith Shop has plans for one you can build yourself for about $400 in parts.
I have the HF unit but I don't think the sell it any more. I bought their x-y vice but had to reverse one part. This required drilling and tapping for some bolts or thumb screws, do not remember which any more. I think there may still be a vid about h0w to do that, It has worked fine for me, got different chisels and the sharpening cones.
It makes no difference where it's made. If it has gib screws, you can adjust the movement to your liking.
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I tried the Harbor Freight X-Y vise. To set it up required height extensions to the mortiser and major tinkering. In the end, I decided it wasn't worth it. My mortiser already had too much slop in it, and the vise didn't help. You can only be as accurate as the least precise component.
Of course it's made in China like everything else is. That boat sailed a long long time ago.
I think a cross slide vise would work better with a drill press. On my Delta bench top mortiser, there is not much clearance between the head and the base or between chisel centerline and column. You would need to be careful to find a vise that fits.
A cross vise is a better idea for use with a mortising attachment for a decent sized drill press, like a Delta 18-900. It would also be handy for drilling round holes.
I don’t own one, but the Wilton cross vises from Northern Tool look like they would do the job.
I tried this several years ago and found it to be a total waste of time. A cheap cross slide vice is...cheap. Even if you adjust the Gibs and get the slop out, it'll need to mounted in such a way that it stays fixed and square to the mortiser head (means dismounting the head and remounting with the base/table 180 degrees to the rear) and the fence. You'll want to add something to the insides of the jaws so that they don't mar the workpiece. And that assumes that there is no flex or twist in the whole assembly.
More robust solutions do exist...use a router (or even a router jig), or spend the dough for a floor standing mortiser. Or a horizontal slot mortiser.
While I don't want to pile on, this is why bench top mortisers (for the most part) are not very good. And why stand-alone machines are as expensive as they are.
For an effective mortiser you need a good vise first and foremost, this is the one thing bench top units do not have. It's very enticing to try and add an xy table or cross-slide vise to improve your tool, but in the end, you wind up loosing capacity with a small unit and some add-ons that really didn't help out that much.
If it's a project you want to try, I would start with a good cross slide table and vise, then adapt the bench top mortiser to it.