I ran across this at a garage sale today.  The wife and I must have stopped at over 20 sales and had found nothing, then we hit this sale.  While not great,it did yield some jaws for an Eifel plier-wrench in the old canvas pouch along with this strange vise, and another tool that I will post later.

The piece is marked VISE JOCKEY, reg. trade mark, U.S. Patent No. 2,595,699.  The patent was issued May 6, 1952 to a Carl E. Petersen of Brooklyn, NY.  It is an extremely well made piece, but I had never seen one and had no idea how it was used.  I was really lucky that there was a patent no. on it.  While not in DATAMP it came up quickly in Google Patents.

It is a precision vise that was designed to be held in the jaws of a regular bench vise.  I tried it in a little bench vise to see how it worked.  I was not impressed.  It looks like a solution in search of a problem to me.  Maybe that explains why they don't appear to be real common.

Lessee...1952-2013...so 60 years old, and it has a few barely discernable scratches in the paint....

Yup...not a major user tool ;P

Neat gadget tho

I actually use a vise in a vise for working on little stuff. It puts the work up higher and closer to my dirty trifocals. It is just a minivise mounted to a block of wood. I also use a mini workbench for my big vise that is a piece of 5/4 pine with a block of 2X2 screwed to the bottom. Same logic.

It looks like it may have been used maybe once or twice.  It is not very user friendly...would definitely not be my 'go to' vise.

Mike

Quote from: mikeswrenches on September 14, 2013, 08:18:45 PM
It looks like it may have been used maybe once or twice.  It is not very user friendly...would definitely not be my 'go to' vise.

Mike

It doesn't look like a "go to" vise, but it does look to me like a special needs vise.  It could be used like a hand vise, for one thing, and one might appreciate the angle for some jobs.  And doesn't the lower jaw move to hold something that thins to one side?  That's something I haven't seen on the one or two such vises like this (and the others didn't have the lugs to hold them in another vise).  I like it.

Surprisingly I couldn't find any reference to it on the net.  Maybe somebody else will have better luck.

Update:  I did find a reference and a picture of one in use in a 1955 issue of Popular Science.  But no reference as to maker.

Mike

Isn't the jaw insert rubber?   If so I would imagine it would be special to hold a semi finished piece, something finished/polished on one side. 

John, the moveable jaw is a very well machined piece of steel that, along with the tang machined on the bottom, also has a longitudinal V groove along with two transverse V grooves machined in the  working face.  All the intricate machining would have made this a very expensive vise.  Probably prohibitively so.

It would be interesting to know what these originally cost.

Mike