Vice jaws Temper

[Ian]

400? Surely you put an extra '0' in there by mistake mate. 40 Rockwell is fairly tough, but not tougher than your hammer, fortunately

[Conan_568]

You must draw the temper back and it is Fahrenheit not celsius.
The jaws should come out of your oven a straw color or darker, which will leave it fairly hard, but not so brittle.
You can go to 450 if you want tougher jaws and 325 to 400 for very hard jaws.
I don't know where you got the figures you show, but if I tempered my knives at 900 degrees they wouldn't hold an edge at all.

[HWooldridge]

Several years ago, I found a leg vise which had heavily damaged jaw faces. Not wanting to spend a lot of time on it, I clamped two old files between the faces and MIG welded all around the edges - top, bottom and sides. That much welding drew the high hardness out of the files. I sanded most of the teeth off with a right angle grinder and put it to work. The jaw faces are parallel at full closed position and hold as well as any other leg vise with factory jaws.

[ThomasPowers]

Well I'd go with soft jaws to hold the pieces I was working on and not mar them as much. I'd rather dress the *replaceable* jaws every so often than to have to deal with the scars on my workpiece.

I have one postvise that has a severe checkering on the jaws that I have covered over with plain mild steel sheet metal caps.

Files have several different alloys; the old Black Diamond---before they have the nicholson stamp on them were supposed to be 1.2%C (I hoard them for billets that need a carbon boost) Some of the modern imports from asia seem to be case hardened as the surface sloughs off when you work them. So sparktest them against known standards to guess what they really are for a particular piece.

[Glenn]

BP0358 Vise Jaw Protector

[tecnovist]

Conan_568 Hi thanks for the info -------& There is a link in my post that site , has a fair bit in there--- after reading all the posts i may leave the first pair annealed and see how they go thanks all