Two Viral Workshop Finds We Actually Bought: Metmo Fractal Vise 32 and the Milwaukee M18 Dual Battery Adapter

Introduction

Every so often a tool takes over your social feed and begs the question: is it actually useful, or just good at looking interesting on camera? We bought two of the most-tagged workshop products to find out: the Metmo Fractal Vise 32, a shape-conforming vise that has circulated for years in clips of its vintage full-size ancestors, and the Milwaukee M18 dual battery adapter, a contraption that promises more amp hours and more power from two standard packs. Both outperformed expectations, in very different ways.

What It Can Do in the Shop

The Fractal Vise 32 is built by Metmo, an outfit based in Yorkshire, England, that makes precision metal fidget tools, puzzles and similar machine-work pieces. We bought the Vise 32 in black with polished stainless jaws because it is cheaper than the all-polished version and performs the same function. It cost $240 with the base plate that lets you screw it to a tabletop.

Out of the box, it finds purchase on nearly everything: awkward forged parts, round objects, and items with only a few parallel edges. For small hole drilling, die grinding and odds-and-ends fab work, it holds parts in place without careful positioning. The real standout use is threads: instead of the usual shop-rag trick that lets round parts spin or damages them, the jaws spread clamping load around the whole diameter, holding threaded pieces firmly without developing flat spots even on soft nickel-plated brass.

Strengths and Weak Points

Fit and finish are better than you might expect. The hard-coat anodized body appears precision-ground on the stainless flat surfaces and well tumbled after machining, with no burrs to speak of. The custom Acme-style drive thread does not look off-the-shelf, and the knurled stainless and brass details feel a bit fancy for rough shop use. On the force meter, it produces about 205 to 215 kg (roughly 460 lb) of clamping pressure by hand, about half of a typical drill press vise.

There are limits. Thin, flat pieces do not get enough purchase on the sliding jaws to resist being pushed down, though you can work around that with blocking like 1-2-3 blocks. Straight tapered parts slowly pinch and push out like a wedge. The little brass-handled ends can also thread off the drive screw, which has a female hex inside, letting you drive it with a drill: clutch setting 10 on an M18 delivered 250 kg (550 lb), and full power reached 570 kg (1,250 lb), on par with or slightly above a larger drill press vise run by hand.

The Power Claims, Tested

The dual M18 battery adapter turns an M18 tool into what the seller pitches as an M36 setup. It is not actually 36 V, but it does double the cells on tap, and the social clips promise increases in both run time and power. At $27, it is far cheaper than a premium battery.

On a torque dyno, a single XC5.0 battery on a high-torque impact measured 789 ft lbs of peak torque. With two packs in the adapter, that rose to 922 ft lbs, and with DeWalt batteries 978 ft lbs, approaching the performance of a 6 amp-hour stacked Forge pack. An instrumentation run told a more nuanced story: under the same high load, a single XC5.0 delivered about 875 W at an average operating voltage of 16.4 V, while the dual adapter pushed over a kilowatt, averaging around 1,000 W, mainly thanks to less voltage sag under sustained draw.

Should You Buy It?

Inside, the adapter is bare-bones. The board acts as a simple bus bar with no regulation of any kind, so mixing a low-charge pack with a full one means they will equalize with as much current as they can manage. The wiring is heavier than many cheap adapters but still raises questions about sustained output. An 8 amp-hour Forge pack on its own still beats it slightly (about 1,070 W versus 1,000 W in testing), and it is clumsy and heavy, but it looks appropriately over-the-top mounted on a tool.

If you already own two standard kit batteries, a $27 adapter in a drawer can approximate Forge-pack performance in a bind without buying a much more expensive premium pack, and it effectively doubles run time on tools that drain batteries fast. Just do not mix charge states, and do not expect it to beat a genuinely high-discharge single battery.

Conclusion

Of the two, the Fractal Vise 32 takes the prize for utility: it is a genuinely used tool around the shop, not a gimmick, though its price reflects premium materials rather than bare function. The dual battery adapter wins on audacity, and it does measurably increase power and run time with standard packs, but its crude internals and awkward size make it situational. Both are worth a look if the use case fits.