1946 Wilton 940 Bench Vise Restoration

This was one of the toughest bench vises i’ve restored. The jaws were rough, the handle and spindle were all chewed up, the keyway was worn, and the swivel base was missing everything to make it functional. step one was to disassemble it. I had to drill out the screws for the jaws to remove them, but disassembly of the rest of the vise was straightforward. I unscrewed the the screws for the front collar and punched out the pins near the end cap to remove the nut assembly. Once the vise was taken apart, all the pieces went into the electrolysis tank to remove all the rust. A day or so in the electrolysis tank and the vise was down to clean iron. I applied a thin coat of BLO(boiled linseed oil) to keep it from flash rusting. After that was time to clean up the anvil surface and sides of the jaw towers. I used my vintage 6x48 craftsman belt sander for this. My advise is to never use low quality harbor freight or similar sanding belts because the seams are horrible. You can feel them bounce and hear the seam when it passes the surface you are sanding. I just found these on amazon with good reviews that I might try next. https://amzn.to/2MWUOuL. For paint, I used hammerite light blue. 3 thin coats is all you need. I baked the paint at 200F in my paint oven. I use an electric smoker similar to this https://amzn.to/2I2aRsw and it’s perfect for most things I need to paint. Next was to build a new handle and clean up the spindle. I first took off the majority of the rough areas of the spindle on my belt sander then chucked it up in my lathe to get a uniform finish. I sanding it up to 1200 grit and then buffed it to a mirror finish. I used 1144 stressproof carbon steel round bar to build the new handle. This stuff is strong enough that it won’t bend, but it’s easy to machine. I turned down the ends of the handle and threaded them so I could use acorn nuts for the ball ends. I threaded the acorn nuts into a scrap rod, and just rounded the nuts down on my lathe. I sanded everything down to 1200 grit again and bugged them out to a mirror finish. The same finish was given to the sit cap and the front retaining collar. Next I turn down a pin and added a knurl so it would fit snuggly in the center of the swivel base. The keyway under the slide was worn so I removed it and reinstalled it with shims. It took some trial and error to get the shims in the correct places to give the vise smooth action with no side to side movement. The last step was to order a set of new jaws from Kevin over at http://www.benchvisejaws.com. I gave the jaws a brushed finish before installing them with new hardware. The jaws he makes are super hard and will last a lifetime. And the vise came out amazing and the new owner was ecstatic.