Vise Restoration

This vise dates from the 1950's and was inherited by my father from his. Fortunately dad had a lot bigger vise', so this was spare.

Here I've already cleaned most of the 60+ years of dirt and grease off it with degreaser and given it a good rub down with a drill and wire brush attachment:

It needs to have the mechanism seperated now in order to fully clean it, ready to be painted again.

Disassembly is a simple process, but a little awkward at the same time.

• There's a retention pin at the rear of the vise that needs hammering out.
• There is a locking pin through the worm gear that prevents it from being threaded off the locking 'foot' on the end of the gear.

On mine, the locking pin seemed to be just a little too long to knock through, and too tightly bound to be pulled out, so I had to snap off one end of it and then hammer it through. I'll need to replace it with a suitable cotter pin.

Parts disassembled and ready to be given a full degrease:

Given another pass under the wire brush:

I think the handle is going to need some emery paper to get it polished up, also the grips on the vise need to be removed - they're really quite badly pitted and worn. It would also be better to paint without those fitted.

Red primer: