(The designer started drooling, just a little, when he first described them to me.) The point is the rotary function is smooth and adjustable. I won’t delve into the inner workings of the head block and bearings. In the past I have criticised this jaw type for the screw near the jaw tips, they tend to project and interfere with tying – thoughtful shaping and recessing all but eliminates that issue. Jaw tips are crucial if one ties small flies, these jaws are very well designed and made a couple of quite complicated shapes and some clever mechanics mean with a hook in place the tips align almost perfectly and I have excellent finger access. The tips of vice jaws inevitably wear but these are strong, should outlive most users. View the jaw tips from the side and they are pointed, view from above and they have meat and strength. Large hooks, up to 9/0(ie, very large hooks) can slip into a notch or “pocket” several millimetres back from the jaw points so the Swiss Vice can handle big hooks. Then tighten the nut and the angle of the arm and hook height and angle is fixed: a complicated mechanism, but a very complete design solution and simple to use, which is what really counts. Slacken the star nut and the head can move up and down while the hook remains level – in fact there’s slight play in that movement so I can adjust and fine, tune the hook angle as it reaches the positioning tool. How about adjusting the height so the hook is on the axis of rotation? Vice makers have devised a wealth of ways to deal with that problem, this uses a clever arm which is actually two arms. So, I can confidently place the hook in the jaws with the hook-shank horizontal. The same feature means I can release the jaws and the hook stays put! The Swiss Vice has spring loaded jaws, so I squeeze the rear of the jaws to position my hook which is held in position before the lever applies grip. Small hooks are the bane of this jaw type, particularly vices with simpler double screw mechanisms hooks either fall out before the tightening screw is adjusted or they fix securely but at the wrong angle. Hook sizes are highly adjustable and exact. Cam surfaces push the rear apart and the jaws tighten. The Swiss Vice jaws have a small sculpted screw near the jaw-tips to adjust for the hook size, try to get the jaws parallel, then lift the lever at the rear of the head. The simplest form of this clamp is two plates side by side, one screw, nearest the holding end, pulls the plates together while another at the rear, farthest from the griping end, pushes the plates apart. The C-Clamp version comes with a smaller lighter slightly more conventional clamp.Ī familiar jaw type, essentially a parallel or engineer’s clamp, on the end of a bent arm. I was supplied with a pedestal base so I can cover another permutation. Exactly the same jaws, arm and stem fit to the Master, Base and C-Clamp versions. Obviously, this is an in-line rotary vice. If that really is all you want, stop reading now. Slip a hook into the jaws, lift the lever until it clicks and locks the hook in place… then tie a fly. This thing fairly bristles with features, original design thinking and applications, but it is an elegant functional tool, and as with most good tools, it’s easy to use. Just describing the Swiss Vice in detail could take more than the space I have in these pages. Click on the article's images to see it at readable size.
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