Hi Guys, first time poster but have read through a fair few posts and learnt a lot already. Thanks to all the folks on the forum who share their knowledge, it's helped me no end work out what's going on with this old vise I acquired a while back.
The story behind it was it was covered in surface rust and seized solid from laying around up the Old Man's workshop for goodness knows how long and one day he decided to dump it outside for the scrapman to grab. I decided against that and grabbed it first, seemed a shame to me to dump this mysterious old giant unit away. I had a large solid plastic crate at home which I filled up with cheap engine oil and dunked her in to soak! A few days later the handle could be removed and when I went to pick up the dynamic jaw the weight of picking up the vise separated it from the body. I then cleaned up the castings and painted them up, covered them in oil, wrapped them in heavy duty plastic and packaged the parts away thinking I'll rebuild that one day... then forgot all about it...
That was 2005 as it turns out so 17 1/2 years later... I was in the garage the other week and I remembered I had a giant vise laying around in bits so I dug out all the parts. The castings survived the damp well and look pretty much as restored. I wire brushed down the handle, gave it an oil and put it all together. I wanted the vise to look it's age so just careful wire brushing only in all cases, all the history and patina remains.
I then looked online to discover the old vises have quite a following, I never even realised there was such a thing! The reason I got this old girl going again because I just hate seeing things get thrown away when a bit of tinker time can bring things back to life. I'm like that with cars, appliances, electronics and more. Anyway thought I'd share the pics, it seems not many of these old 1940's p61 around from what I can see. Date stamp is 06 - 41.
The story behind it was it was covered in surface rust and seized solid from laying around up the Old Man's workshop for goodness knows how long and one day he decided to dump it outside for the scrapman to grab. I decided against that and grabbed it first, seemed a shame to me to dump this mysterious old giant unit away. I had a large solid plastic crate at home which I filled up with cheap engine oil and dunked her in to soak! A few days later the handle could be removed and when I went to pick up the dynamic jaw the weight of picking up the vise separated it from the body. I then cleaned up the castings and painted them up, covered them in oil, wrapped them in heavy duty plastic and packaged the parts away thinking I'll rebuild that one day... then forgot all about it...
That was 2005 as it turns out so 17 1/2 years later... I was in the garage the other week and I remembered I had a giant vise laying around in bits so I dug out all the parts. The castings survived the damp well and look pretty much as restored. I wire brushed down the handle, gave it an oil and put it all together. I wanted the vise to look it's age so just careful wire brushing only in all cases, all the history and patina remains.
I then looked online to discover the old vises have quite a following, I never even realised there was such a thing! The reason I got this old girl going again because I just hate seeing things get thrown away when a bit of tinker time can bring things back to life. I'm like that with cars, appliances, electronics and more. Anyway thought I'd share the pics, it seems not many of these old 1940's p61 around from what I can see. Date stamp is 06 - 41.
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