My vice

The bench vise I have had for the last few years is a cheaper made in China model. It's been ok and I'll hang on to it in case I ever need 2 vices or need to hold onto pipe (it has pipe jaws) but I think I want to use this one unless Heather decides that we need to sell it but it's got some cool history. I think it was probably my father in-laws fathers originally. I decided to take it apart the other day and start trying to breathe some life back into it. There's about 6 parts to the whole thing. Here is the sliding jaw and the handle/threaded rod.

This is the non-moving jaw and the female threaded nut on the inside of it. You can see that the actual clamping areas of the jaws (although really square and flush when closed) are thoroughly rusted. I soaked them in penetrant for days and used an impact driver and they wouldn't budge. I actually found a guy who would make me a set of these but it would mean me drilling out the set screws for these and I really didn't wanna go that far. I wasn't sure if I wanted to do a full on restoration/paint of this or just clean it up a bit.

This is another shot of the non-moving jaw. There's a quarter inch pin that goes in from the bottom of this jaw and hold that large nut in place after it's slid in from behind. There's a shim in there too so it fits tight. So simple.

This is after spending some time on it with a wire wheel. At this point I was really unsure what I wanted to do. Initially, I was going to paint it. But...I actually like the antique patina look that it has. It looks used. It's got a lot of stories. It's a tool that's gonna get used.

Here it is as of yesterday.