WEN Cross Vise, 3.25-Inch with Compound Slide for Mills and Drill Presses

Exactly as stated by several people who bought it. I spent a few hours after disassembling it (watching carefully, for reassembly). I cleaned off all the factory oil film. I polished all the friction areas using 600 grit sandpaper. This removed some small roughness and burrs. After thoroughly cleaning the threads of the worm screws (Longitudinal Feed, Cross Feed and Leadscrew) I observed if there were any imperfections. I don't know if I was lucky, the CV413 unit I received came with very well-defined threads. After all the above process, I lubricated the rails, bearings, worm screws, and even the handles, all with a layer of WD-40 Specialist White Lithium Grease Spray. I reassembled the vise, readjusted the screws that define the longitudinal and transverse displacement pressure and the result was excellent and surprising, showing that the WEN is a good quality tool, needing only a little rework after leaving the box. Smooth movements without play, except in the crank handles when reversing the direction of movement. Yes, that was the only downside... It is a small deficiency mentioned by others, however, it does not compromise the tool in my humble opinion. Anyway, great cost-benefit! With this procedure, I would recommend its purchase without any hesitation.

Here is what is good. It's a better design with a better fit and finish than most of the ones for sale in this price range. To be exact, you can find some identical to this one for twice the price. It's fairly sold and carriage moves pretty smoothly. I didn't completely dissemble it to improve the movement. I simply added some tacky grease to the slides. For the price (about $75), it is okay. And it fits nicely on a Craftsman 10" drill press from the early 2000s. I secured it with four 1/2" carriage bolts and one 7/16" carriage bolt in the back. No modification to the Craftsman drill press was required. And there is plenty of room to use it on the drill press.Here is what is not so good. The handle have sharp pointed ends. There may be a reason for these, but they kept sticking my hands through me gloves. They are quite sharp. I ended up grinding the sharp ends round on a table grinding and then buffing them smooth. It's much more comfortable to work with now. Next, there is a considerable amount of slop in the controls. And there's no way to improve this. I was able to tighten the slides, but the slop remains when changing direction.Overall, I'm giving this 4 out of 5 stars due to the slop in the controls which doesn't appear to be necessary with this level of fit and finish.

I got my Wen 4.25 cross slide vise this morning. I don’t know how Amazon can deliver it overnight for free? Box was in perfect condition and I knew I was off to a good start. I unboxed it and started playing with it. It comes with the slides locked and handles off. I assembled it and adjusted it and I was pretty excited about how nice it looked and functioned. I disassembled it and cleaned it up and used valve lapping compound on all the contact surfaces. Lubed it up and reassembled. It works really great for an 80.00 vise. I read reviews about the quality and I think it’s great for the price. You can probably get a 700.00 to 1,000 dollar vise that is near perfect. Everyone would still buy this vise because they don’t want to spend the money on a high quality piece, myself included. I did buy 4 new set screws and nuts to replace the set screws that doesn’t have nuts. It made a big difference because I had screws back off when I was playing with it. I have yet to mount it or clamp anything in it but I don’t see any problems with it. The casting was smooth and looks good also. I wanted a Wilton 5” for my JET IDP22 but I couldn’t get any Dimensions on the base to see if it would work with my table slot locations. It looks small on my drill press… if you are willing to spend some time on it, you will have a good tool…

I bought this vise to mount to my benchtop drill press so that I could do some milling in addition to drilling. I had not previously purchased any Wen brand products. I found the quality level of this vise to be better than I expected for the price. I think a lot of the people who buy these things need to temper their expectations a little. For under $60 you're not going to get a production-grade piece that's accurate to a thousandth of an inch. What you do get is a decent quality vise that can position your work with reasonable precision. I found that drill press vises tend to fall in to 4 categories: 1) poorly machined cheap junk; 2) better quality at a reasonable price (this product fits here); 3) the same quality but with a different name brand at twice the price; and 4) high precision manufacture for hundreds of dollars. My vise arrived in perfect shape. It was easy to assemble. With a little lubrication and some fine tuning to the tension adjustment screws I quickly had it set up to my preferences. The only problem was... my drill press was too small to mount it! Long story short, after a bit of research I actually ended up buying a new drill press from Wen also. I got the Wen 4212 benchtop drill press and I couldn't be happier. That's a separate review, but suffice to say that nothing near that price point came even close to the features or quality and I'm very satisfied.