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Rammed my toe into an interesting Vise

mreisner

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Picking up and cleaning up and generally moving stuff around in the unheated part of my shop and ran into literally a vise on the floor that I've been stepping around for several years. I picked it up and set it on a bench to take a look at it and I noticed a brass tag on it. Cleaned it off and was surprised to see that apparently it was some type of a war product. It's a Colombian, 5 in I believe. Just wondered if anybody else has seen something like that?20260806_201300.jpg
 
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jd_1138

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Fisher Detroit meant it was made at a GM factory during the war. Very cool piece of functional history.

Instead of building a 1942 Pontiac Torpedo; GM churned out actual torpedos or at least tools to make them or parts of them.
 
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Private Lugnutz

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Just wondered if anybody else has seen something like that?
Yes. They show up down on the Vintage Tools Discussion forum and in the mega Vises thread up here on the General forum, too. All brands, including Columbian. I'll requote some info I have provided before and you can click on those to see the original discussion, vises, and tags.
But, just as a friendly FYI, your vise may just as well have been used on any number of projects. GM's Fisher Body (Aircraft) Division built parts for the B-17, B-25, B-29, P-80, and other aircraft.
you probably know, the DPC bought machines, vises, and hand tools - even entire buildings, or funded the construction of new facilities, to augment defense production. Your vise could've been provided to any one of the GM Fisher plants involved in aircraft parts production, and also and probably very likely Cleveland, Ohio, which they added at the onset of the war specifically to increase defense production.
GM received over $1B from the federal government during WWII. Their Fisher Division alone received $124M. Those figures are not the amount of the contracts awarded to them to build things, and those figures don't include the contract numbers. That's just equipment, buildings, machinery, tools, etc to augment and upgrade the capacity of their existing plants and production capabilities.
The DPC spent a little over $50M on GM Fisher. Some of that was your vise
There have been a few vises and other notable equipment (Canton crane, Delta DP, workbenches, etc) posted sporadically down here on the Vintage board sporting DPC tags and several vises on the Mega Vise thread on the General board. There are no known records on Internet Archive or Google Books to look up that number on the tag and it's almost impossible to know where it came from without other information.

Just to clarify, the DPC was not a military organization, per se. It was a quasi-federal government, quasi-corporate entity that was part of FDR's Office of Emergency Management, prewar, and then interrelated with the War Production Board after we declared war. It was established explicitly to equip the war production industry here at home. DPC expanded existing mfg facilities, converted civilian mfg facilities into military production facilities, built new plants, and outfitted them all with equipment, from vises to machinery. They bought your vise on contract from Columbian and then put it, likely with many others, in a mfg plant somewhere to assist some company make materiel for WWII. Your vise was never issued to one of the technical services (Army, Army Air Corps, Navy, etc). It was in a civilian plant turning out something for shells, planes, vehicles, etc. That's not to diminish or dismiss its valued service or coolness factor. Just clarifying.
 

Private Lugnutz

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Fisher Detroit meant it was made at a GM factory during the war.
No. It was made by Columbian at the Columbian factory, purchased by the Defense Plant Corporation (you can read an explanation of what that was in my reply above), and provided by DPC to GM's Fisher plant in Detroit to expand their capacity and production.
 
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