Oliver Patternmaking Vise--Market Opportunity?

Vises
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@ Jason…

Threw your hat in the ring, heads up. Been following James Wright at Wood By Wright How To YT channel. He’s been talking a lot about his vintage Oliver Patternmaking Vise lately. I’m wondering if you sense a market here?

Relevant URLs:

Here was the comment I posted at the first URL:
“A quick search for “oliver pattern making vise” on eBay reveals that there appears to be a robust market for Oliver (and Emmert) vises (more rarely) and vise parts (more commonly). That suggests there might be a market for new manufacture of these vises. The only guy I know–very sketchy amateur background on my part–who can pull this off would be Jason over at Fireball Tool. Although patternmakers back in the day probably used one or more of the unusual features on this vise daily, those are very rare woodworkers, as you mentioned. Seems to me that fabricators, welders and metalworkers in general (of which I am not…yet) would. All the more reason Jason, who is much more into that metal stuff than wood, might be interested. By the way, if we’re not making wood original patterns anymore for metal castings, what are we using? 3D-printed plastics? 3D-printed metals?”

I may be way off the mark here in terms of your interest, Jason, but I am intrigued at this old-school solution to real-world, enduring problems. Thoughts?

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I’ve seen this style before. It’s pretty clever design. I always up to remanufacture the original one. If there’s enough interest in the vise I’ll make it.

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It does feel like there is a lot of interest in making a vise that can hold odd shapes at any angle, i think the question is more like which vise to recreate or what pieces to incoporate from multiple designs.

there is also this universal vise which feels close to a fireball design already:

and of course the fractal vise:

and then finally something very simple and still extremly useful, the powrarm positioner that you put a small/med vise onto.

I almost wonder if it makes sense to modularize things a bit so you could have, for example,

  1. a simplified (maybe only 2-3 levels) fractal vise set of jaws that can slip into any existing fireball vise/maybg using a 3/4 pin so it would fit on top of a side kick, giving it the ability to hold odd stuff.
  2. some sort of fast but fairly heavy duty omni positioner.
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Man, I would love to see a Fireball version of that first one! Hell I’ld love to have that one! never came across one of those in all my interweb cruising!