Review on HHIP 3900 2013 Ultra Precision Toolmakers by Duane Kerr

My wife bought me a 3 inch vise as a gift. no previous experience what to expect from it. I've had two of these now and as much as I want to say otherwise I can't recommend it due to serious quality control issues. The first one I received had a .009" gap on one end when closed and is missing the set screw that holds the horizontal pin at the bottom of the jam nut. Most of the corners were chamfered, but the corners around the moveable jaw were not chamfered. (Those edges weren't supposed to be very beveled, but they were very sharp. The solid jaw edges weren't visibly beveled, but the sharpness of the edges was compromised - as I now understand it should be.) I have to tell the folks at HHIP were very responsive and quickly sent me a new vise! For this reason I am giving the vise 2 stars instead of 1. When the second vise arrived it had none of the flaws that the first had. Unfortunately, he had completely different problems. My initial plan was to simply move the moveable jaw from the new one to the base of the first, but that proved impossible as the difference in width was up to 2mm. Tracks on which movable jaws slid. (Each moving jaw fitted snugly into the base it came with, but they weren't even remotely interchangeable.) The problems with this second vise were: 1. The corners on the face of the moving jaw were broken correctly, but the corners of the solid jaws were sharp. .I fixed it by messing around with the file a bit. "I found that the steel was actually hardened well; not as hard as the teeth of a file, but almost as hard as it seems to me. To avoid excessive wear on my file, I used a small stone to reduce sharpness.2. The nut on the bottom of the turnbuckle was the wrong size for this vise, it was slightly narrower than the first vise. It entered a channel on the underside of the vise body but was very loose leaving the pin with a large unsupported protrusion between the edges of the nut and vise body. It had a set screw in the nut, but the screw was about two turns too short when tightened on the pin.3. Comparing the two vises, I found that the 6mm screw holes on the sides of the fixed jaw (which are designed for attaching stops or other extras you might need) are problematic. The holes in the first vise were correctly tapered, but the threads were too large and the screw I used to test was loose until I drove it deep enough that it came out to a depth of 2cm. The holes in the second vise were not beveled. The threads were closer to the right size. My test fat fits with a lot less slop, but not too far. I found and removed some debris that I believe came from the grinding process during production. After that, the control screw stood up correctly. Maybe sometime in the future I'll decide to trim the edges of the screw holes, but I won't mess with that now as I don't know if I'll ever use it. Clamp screw thread damaged. However, the damaged threads were far enough from the bolt head that I didn't think they would ever get into the jam nut. Under magnification I saw that a few threads were torn and kinked. I easily removed the shards with a pickaxe. .On the other hand, the fact that a bad thread would crack and snap instead of warping or deforming proves the screw was properly hardened for machining.5. This last problem is almost ridiculous. The label on the 2 vise body shows the correct model number (3900-2013) but the description is incorrect; Calling it a 2" vise instead of a 3" vise (the spec says it's really 73mm) actually is. Properly sized nut from the first vise, and then replace a good bolt and nut with the second. The folks at HHIP have been great, but the bottom line is that neither of the two vises I received have ever had to leave the factory.