In addition to soldering irons, power supplies, cables and all those measuring instruments, every electronics engineer at home or in the lab at work will always have a collection of mechanical tools that go far beyond screwdrivers and side cutters. There is practically always something like a Dremel, a jigsaw and needle files of various sizes. Needless to say when you are drilling lots of small holes or working on some aluminum angle stock it‘s useful if you can hold the item steady in a vice.

All engineers have vices


 
Prepare to unbox the Spannfix 9-205 multi-angle vice.

Of course, that's the case with me, too. Even though I prefer the soldering iron to the drill or the saw despite my two-year training as a precision mechanic, I still use a heavy cast iron vice bolted to a bench close to my drill press, and handy for holding large items down while I beat them into submission with a hammer or shape them with an angle grinder. Close to my workstation where more delicate jobs are undertaken there is a smaller blue vice, all in all in the age of the 3D printer we still occasionally need to get down and dirty with the hardware.
 
My (t)rusty old vice has now been put out to pasture.

As you can see, my old blue vice is quite small, nothing fancy, just a standard vice. The jaws are made of metal so I was always need to be careful clamping items in case I get too enthusiastic and end up crushing or marking the clamped item. Its only luxury feature is that the body can be rotated 360 ​​° in the horizontal plane. Tilting or fixing the workpiece at any arbitrary angle is not possible and I’ve often thought how handy it would be if I could firmly secure a workpiece in the exact position required to screw, saw, drill, file or solder...