Motivation

When you are tinkering, breaking things, trying to take them apart or attempt to put them together, sooner or later you will need something that can hold the parts in place.

The most common thing for this is a bench vice. Big or small you have options. Went online and wanted to buy one, but oh my they are pricey enough that I got discouraged. Then I have remembered that somewhere I have seen a bench vice around the house. After finishing it out I was presented with something sad, but kinda functional.

The poor fella

As you can see the thing was quite beaten up. It is missing its jaws, it is covered with rust and all kinds of trauma. It looks like it oxidized to green at some points, but that doesn’t make sense as it clearly rusts, so what are those green splotches if the whole thing is otherwise black?

I guess it doesn’t matter, the treatment is the same.

Took it apart. The two screws came out easy enough, but the sliding top had so much embedded grime under it that it had to be hammered out with a rubber mallet. After that it got a big dose of break cleaner and a good scrubbing. It didn’t look much better, but at least the solidified grime was now gone.

Grinding

To be able to access the damage to the surface it had to be ground down. Took my respirator, a Dremel, safety glasses and started grinding. It took me about 5 hours in total, but managed to remove most of the dirt.

We learned that the green splotches were part of the original paint. They were just covered by a lot of grime.

On a closer look we could see a lot of pitting, the rust really ate into it, and I am quite sure something was broken off of it.

Why is the internal thread not part of the assembly, but freely rotating? I would expect it to be machined into the part. Maybe back then this was the way? I can’t even tell how old this bench vice is. But guessing from the grime, broken pieces and with 4 different sized holes for the jaws, it definitely got some love before. Okay, I know it is at least 50 years old, because my mother claims this was his fathers when she was little.

The only identifiers on it were that undecipherable symbol on the side and these few random looking numbers on the back.

As you can see there were still a lot of parts remaining which I simply couldn’t reach with the sander drum bit. This bothered me enough that went and bought some wire wheels and went at it again with some additional grinder disk support. After another 4 hours of cleaning

Now the symbol is much more visible, but I still have no idea what it could represent. In some places the pitting is quite bad, but old rusty tools get like that if abandoned long enough. Couldn’t really take the rust of the tightening screw, because I had nothing that could fit into the threads well enough, that could take the rust off. I think if covered with some grease that should reasonably protect it, so it will be fine.

In case you are interested these are the bits I have used

The sanding drum on the left took care of most of it, then the grinding wheel next to it did the same job as the sanding drum to places where that couldn’t fit. Lastly, the grinding disk got into the nooks and took of everything. Where nothing fit, or the area was big enough that the grinding disk would take too long the wire wheels worked well. Although these don’t remove material like the sanders, with a bit of patience got somewhat comparable results.

Painting

Painted it with 2 coats of Hammerite as recommended on the paint can, assembled it, greased it up and got this beauty:

New jaws

Finally, she needed a new set of jaws. Lacking any other fabrication methods these had to be 3D printed, which would be fine for my use case. I mostly need it to hold a PCB or something small, but never very tightly. There is no need here for too much force.

For this I had to redrill the 4 holes, because 2 of them had broken screws in them, the other 2 were of different sizes. Now all of them are of the same size and fully drilled through.

Then, like always, made the perfect measurements on the first try and printed the new jaws.

The lessons learned

Buy a proper respirator like this one: 3M Half Facepiece 6300 Anything else is garbage. Any of these 1 time use masks that got popular during covid, these N95 masks don’t fit the face well enough that they would filter the particles. I realized this, when after the first grinding session I had black streaks running down my nose, clearly signaling where some dirt got in. Not sure how many particles I have inhaled, but it was enough to feel it for a few days. Get a mask! It is much more expensive than a throw away one yes, but at least it actually works and depending on your use it can last for years.