[TheForge] Re: God, I love the junkyard. A huge post vise!

[Dann Johnson]

Jeff, 

4 or 5 years ago I picked up  a  stuck /"frozen" post vise.  The steel 
handle was bent really bad like someone had tried a big cheater bar.  When I 
finally got it unstuck, the vice jaws turned out to be pristine "like new" . 

I had suspected it was frozen up due to rusty threads, but turned out the 
exterior of casted cone body of the female threaded half  was wedged stuck 
into the front half of the vise.  ( Kind of the reversal of male / female 
roles  <grins>)  The internal male / female thread were also kind of stuck / 
wedged against one another because of mechanical stress of the first 
problem. 

Like you, I used splitting wedges and penetrating oil, and over a few weeks 
time, it finally came apart, without damaging anything. Then I used a flap 
disk on my side grinder to clean and polish the exterior of the female 
threaded cone so that the vise could open and close smoothly without binding 
with the front half. 

Then I think that I figured out how the old vise had gotten stuck in the 
like new condition.  It simply would have HAD to work when it was brand new. 
However  someone probably unscrewed the threaded part all the way, the 
female threaded casting then slips out the back of the vise.  It was not 
uniform / had been cast imperfectly, so if someone  flipped half at turn in 
the rear half of the vise and then re assembled it,  There was just enough 
extra iron on one side to bind / freeze everything up when it next got 
tightened down. 

My stuck vise turned into a real sweetheart.
I mounted the vise on  huge cast iron fly wheel from an old hay baler, with 
a "post" of thick wall 4 by 4 square tubing . 

Dann