Miniature vice in action: A test object

Now that I have designed this miniature vice, I have no idea how I could ever live without one. Get it here if you don’t have one yet:
https://www.prusaprinters.org/prints/50151

Within one day of having it complete with it’s table clamp, I decided I want some little distance rolls on the bottom of one of them, so that I can put on little rubber knobs. But how do you cut a M4 thread into these only 10mm small and round parts, that you can’t really grab to hold them, while you try to force the thread cutter in?

Well, fear not! After all we have our little vice now (actually I have printed three of them right away, just to be on the safe side). And we have a 3D printer, so we can easily make ourselves a little fixture for these round objects. With the fixture it’s a simple thing to clamp the ring straight and level into the vice.

As the vice is clamped to our table, we now have both hands free to drive the thread cutter precisely into the rings. The whole thread cutting becomes a matter of a few minutes and the results are excellent as you can see in the picture. All four rings sit perfectly flat on the ground plane of the vice.

Feel free to try it yourself, both the rings and the fixture are available in this post. At 100% scale the fixture can hold round objects of 10mm diameter and up to 10mm of height. By simply scaling it in Prusaslicer, you can adapt it for any round (and relatively flat) part, e.g. scale it to 254% for holding a one-inch round object of up to one inch height. In that case, the width of the fixture would be 40.6mm, which is just within the range that the miniature vice can safely clamp.

Happy printing!