A little light vise reading this Christmas morning. I recently bought an old Adams vise, made in Dubuque, Iowa. I posted it on page 1143, post 22586 of this thread:
Underneath the filth it seemed to have a fair amount of possibly original paint. So I decided to keep it original, and not strip it down. It is probably the oldest vise I own, and I thought keeping the original finish would be neat. Like they say, "It is only original once".
The first problem arose when I tried to remove the dynamic jaw. If you look closely at the photo below you may see that the leadscrew is bent behind the nut:
After carefully studying the situation, I was able to get the vise into my shop press and straighten the leadscrew "in place" just enough to get the dynamic jaw out. After about 12 careful operations in the press, it was straight enough to move in and out with just a little tightness in spots.
I hit the handle and spindle with a brass wire wheel:
The jaw detail came out after cleaning. They looked good after the same wire wheel treatment:
Then I cleaned up all the other parts with soap and water, followed by 0000 steel wool on the areas with paint loss. Then I soaked everything in light oil and left it for a couple of days:
I'll finish the story on the next post.
