I got real tired of constantly recentering and replacing soft jaws on my Saunders Machine Works hobby vise .
it’s awesome for plenty of things but I do a lot of coin/token prototyping and (in theory) a self centering vise would let me swap out coins of all sizes without re-zeroing.
Enter the Xin Dian self centering vise. A little ~$70 import that seems to be good enough. Only problem is there’s no way to hold onto it.
So I cut a fixture plate out of delrin. It fits the hole pattern on my SMW m6 Nomad bed.
The bolts underneath are fully countersunk sub-surface so they do not contact the bed. In theory this electrically isolates the vise to facilitate conductive probing ![]()
The holes in the corners are used to bolt the plate to the bed and the 6 additional holes along the side are reamed 6mm to get some repeatability by way of the SMW locating pins ![]()
Is it super rigid? No. Does it eat Z height? Absolutely.
Neither is a problem with my particular use case of very low profile, very low cutting force operations. Gotta appreciate the little wins ![]()


