Bit of a heads up for a bargain. RMweb alerted me to a rather nice little tool set in the infamous middle isle of Lidl.
£7.99 buys you a vice, pin vice and sets of drill bits with multiples of 9.5mm, 0.6mm, 1mm, 1.2mm, 1.5mm, 1.8mm, 2mm, 2.3mm and 3mm plus some "micro bits" ranging from 2.1mm to 3mm.
The drills look OK. Certainly better than the super-cheap multi packs you see at shows for a fiver which frequently, in my experience, don't have points on them, at leat not where the point should be.
Cost savings can be seen in the pin vice which , while nice to hold, doesn't have the nicely cast teeth of a better tool. It's OK for stuff about 1mm I would guess and possibly a little below.
I bought the set for the vice. Again, I have much better machine vice's. This one is a bit rattly and feels cheap, BUT, it has screw-in jaws for holding round objects and thus is worth the price of the set alone. It's a problem I've often faced. V-blocks are OK, but don't go small enough for some work, and I think this will be better. Or at least OK enough for me to risk the money.
Leamington's store had about a dozen of these things on the shelf, but I suspect they will go fast.
Thanks for the tip, Phil - plenty in stock at Malvern this am !
ReplyDeleteI was in Lidl earlier, but never thought to look at the centre aisle, like you, I think the vice could be handy, already owning a set of pin vices and thankfully some half decent drill bits for it
ReplyDeleteThe rattly moving jaw can be vastly improved by reducing its sliding clearance to reduce its tendency to tilt if using the screw on jaw tops. File a bit off the bottom of the moving jaw where its retaining washer seats to bring it nearly flush with the underside of the slot in the base. Don't take off too much, or you'll need to shim it! Grease the end of the main screw while you've got the jaw out. This doesn't do anything for lateral slop so you still need to get the work well centred cross-wise so the moving jaw doesn't angle and bind.
ReplyDeleteThe pin vice is OK for what it is - it can securely chuck the smallest drill in the set (0.5mm) if you haven't abused it, and can take up to 1.8mm before the end of the jaws become flush with its nose and you start to loose chucking pressure. The largest it will accept fully open is 3.5mm but I wouldn't advise that for anything more than very light work.
Lets hope we see this bundle again in 2023.
How do you open drill bits please?
ReplyDeleteThere is a clip on the side of the box. It's fiddly, a small screwdriver might be useful to give it a proper prod.
ReplyDelete