Restoring an Old Bench Vice
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I recently inherited an old bench vice from my father-in-law. As you can see from the photo on the left, it had been in a damp shed for a lot of years and was looking rather sorry for itself.
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This shows the parts of the vice after I'd started to take it apart. The vice jaws are still attached in this photo. I suspect the jaws have never been removed since the vice was new and the screws were very firmly attached. One came out with the aid of a manual impact screwdriver, two came out with drilling and a screw extractor, the last one broke the screw extractor and I ended up having to weld a bit of bar stock to it in order to get it out.
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With the jaws off and a superficial clean, there was still a lot of rust on the body parts and the handle, but the thread and the spring was looking okay. I was about to go on holiday for a couple of weeks, so I got an old toolbox and filled it up with white vinegar. All the vice parts (except the spring, washer and cross-pin) went in the vinegar bath, along with a plastic carrier bag full of bricks to use up some of the extra space and reduce the amount of vinegar required.
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When I got back from holiday, this is what the toolbox looked like!
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The parts came out of the toolbox and were given a quick rub-down with a wire brush. In this photo there are still a few bits of rust where it was difficult to get a wire brush to: these were addressed after taking the photo with a Dremel with a small diameter wire brush in the spindle.
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The vice jaw screws were by now in a lot of pieces. The vice is old and the threads for the jaw mounts were from some outdated thread standard, either 1/4" BSW or 1/4" UNC. Rather than bother trying to get hold of the old-fashioned screw, I decided to drill the thread out and insert an M6 thread repair coil. This shows a simple alignment tool I used to ensure I was drilling square (it's just a cylinder of steel with the right hole size drilled through). This was held in place with a clamp and a battery powered hand drill used to remove the old thread.
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Here is the vice jaw mount with its metric thread coils inserted.
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It was then just a case of painting all the bits that needed painting. I used Hammerite as I already had some: this was painted directly onto the bare metal. Time will tell whether I should have used a primer, but it's holding up well so far.
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The finished article, ready for use; now I just need a bigger workshop so I have space to mount it somewhere!
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