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Restoration of (Another) Rusty Deadlocked Vise
In this video I'm restoring a very small rusty and deadlocked Gressel bench vise. Its jaws are just 80mm wide. My friend has found this tiny vise on the steel waste and I thought this would be cool for a video.
On first sight it was only seized and had some additional holes. When disassembling I also quickly realized that something on the half round part was not right and after sandblasting I also saw pretty deep damages near the jaws. To disassemble the movable jaw I quickly made a tool to open the vise. There's also a video about that on my second channel „my mechanics insights“, link below.
I closed the two additional holes with slight press fit plugs and closed the gap with welding. After filing the welds flush the two holes completely disappeared.
There was a bit of a mess with the threads at the half round part, so I decided to close them all with very tight press fitted plugs and cut two new M4 threads. That worked very well and these plugs will never ever come out again.
On the other deep damages I decided to weld up new material with cast iron stick welding rod. That was my very first time stick welding. Was a bit tricky to get used to it, but the end result turned out very well. I was able to file and sand all surfaces perfectly clean afterwards.
I decided to paint this vise in a nice red (RAL3011) with white highlights on the lettering.
As the spindle only had very little rust, I was able to clean it very nicely with rust remover, wire brush, some sandpaper and Scotch Brite.
For the remaining parts I first removed the deep pitting, removed the sharp edges, recut the threads and then sandblasted them to remove the remaining rust and make a nice and even texture on the sanded surfaces. To darken all these parts I used the method of hot bluing.
As the rough pattern of the jaws were in pretty good condition I decided to restore them. After a night in the rust remover and a bit of wire brushing the jaws already looked pretty good. I also had to bend them as they were a bit out of shape. As they're just case hardened this worked very well. Then I sanded all the surfaces clean, chamfered all edges and applied cold bluing to darken them.
In the end I'm very happy how this little bench vise has turned out. In my opinion the red looks very nice together with the black steel parts and the shiny sanded surfaces and the white details of the lettering are just the cherry on top.
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