Ok, how does this guy keep topping himself?! Hand Tool Rescue is one of my favorite content creators on YouTube because he not only is always working on something interesting, he’s doing it with a lot of talent, skill, and a sense of humor. The combo of the work and the subject here is magical. The thing he is laying hands on is a 100+ year old “fractal vise”. Nope, we had no idea what this thing was either until we saw it work and get ripped apart and fixed up.
Think of a vise that has some 30 jaws nested into each other. All of them can move independently and that means this is a vise that can conform to just about any weird thing you put into it. From an aluminum banana, to a pen, to a glass jar and more. You can see the usefulness of this device when it is demonstrated by conforming to a wrench. This thing had to have been pretty damned expensive when it first came out and we’re guessing only machinists would have had the need for it. Mr Hand Tool does not have a ton of information into the backstory of the vise but boy did he have some work into getting it right.
From machining stuff, brazing stuff, truing all the jaws up, and the list goes on, this was a decent investment for someone to have this work done. We’re thankful that they did, otherwise we’d have still never heard of a vise like this!
