Death of a Pin Vice

It's with perhaps an odd sense of joy that I bid farewell to my pin vice. I literally wore it out. And what better way for a tool to go? It has served me extraordinarily well all these decades, providing invaluable assistance in my modeling efforts.

I'm not exactly certain, but I may have acquired my pin vice possibly as early as high school. It joined a troupe of indispensible tools that included a few X-Acto knives, a pair of tweezers, jeweler's needle-nose pliers, and a number of others, most of which I still have. I've no recollection of where I might have purchased it; my best guess would be the (long gone) Franklin Five and Dime in Meredith, New Hampshire—a great hobby shop, in spite of its name.

When I think back on some of the most memorable projects made possible by my pin vice, I recall in particular a rock grapple I built for my friend of nearly forty years, Rick Spano. I was laid up with a nasty flu, and needed something to take my mind off of my misery. So, using a brochure from a 1:1 grapple manufacturer, I made a working N scale version for one of his many cranes (below—click image to view video). The grapple was made of brass; each piece was cut and shaped using only hand tools. I'm proud to say that it looks and functions almost exactly like the real thing.



That was back in my college days; more recently, my pin vice made it possible for me to articulate and motorize an otherwise static GHQ excavator (below—click image to view video). This project required drilling scores of tiny holes with great precision. Today it's over a dozen years old and, like the 30-odd-year-old rock grapple, still functioning well.



These were but two of many hundreds of projects I've completed over the course of my modeling career to date—many of which would not have been possible without my trusty little pin vice. But now it has reached the end of its life: it can no longer hold a drill bit smaller than around #70, and since I regularly use #80 bits, its usefulness is now limited.

Curiously, its brand new replacement is identical, which means this long-lived model of pin vice must be popular as well as robust—not to mention, at less than eight dollars, quite economical. I was tempted to spend nearly three times as much for some fancier new one, but I liked the idea of having a familiar tool on hand; plus, it feeds a sense of continuity.

So, farewell my faithful friend. You served a good, useful life, and I couldn't possibly ask for more than that.