rmarty
New member
I am new to this forum. I hope this is the proper place to post my first comment. I recently got interested in bench vises. I am a retired IT pro who worked for IBM in the 1960's and had my own business until I retired last year. I had a Chinese vise! The kind that swivels from regular jaws to pipe jaws. Terrible vise! So I started looking for a good American vise of rather large size. I had been to a chrome shop to drop off car parts and was taking the back roads home when I saw an interesting looking business on the side of the road. They had old farm tools scattered all over the place so I stopped in to see what I could find. The owner said he had an old vise that he couldn't get to work and told one of his employees to show it to me to see if I wanted to buy it. We looked all over the place until another employee said they sent the vise down the road to a scrap yard because they couldn't get it to open. He said the vise was huge and it took three guys to pull it off the table it was on. He said he thought it was a Chas Parker and had jaws a foot wide or or larger. He figured it weighed over 200 lbs. So I drove down the road to the scrap yard. The place had went out of business the week before! There was a phone number on the piece of paper on the gate so I called it and asked the gentleman who answered the phone about the vise. He said yeah he had the vise at his house. He wouldn't sell it because he had fixed it and was going to use it. I asked him what it was and he said a Chas Parker 978. So I started a search, found this site and another site with vise information. It says the old Chas parker 978 was a very large vise that weighed almost 300 lbs. Needless to say I am seriously depressed! However I always seem to "Almost" catch the big one! I live in the DFW area of Texas and am looking for a rather large vise. If any members could help my search I would really appreciate it. Thanks. This site seems to be a very nice one and I have learned quite a bit in a short amount of time.
