Heard you guys like pictures so...
Not too bad for a $100 vise, and a couple evenings of fun.
Before:
This thing was pretty nasty.
Even worse inside. WTH is up with this ugly flat red smudge I'm seeing all over steel?
New paint.
It's not perfect, but a hell of an improvement.
Looks wet in there but it's not.
The result.
One thing I noticed while cleaning up the chamfers, is that the steel was extremely hard in most places, but near any of the holes, and especially the key slots, it was completely annealed. My file sounded like marble on concrete in the middle, but as soon as I got to the key slot for the fixed jaw, it sunk in like a hot knife in butter. Apart from all the fluffy stuff which I actually enjoy fixing up (I actually think it kind of a treat), this is one of several things I found that spoke to it's low price, and
couldn't be easily remedied. The casting was also pretty poor, with lost of small voids, and some discoloration that couldn't be buffed out, and you can see in the last shot, on the end, where the lock-down nut slides appears notched (inside-top-left) on one side and not the other. Funny too that there were 4 different colors of paint inside. The nicest piece was the sliding jaw block, it had a nice blue flake paint inside the casting void. Wonder what vise that came off of? Any way, fun little project, still wound up being a pretty nice little vise. Thanks again for help!