Brown & Sharpe No. 21 Machinists Vise

 This Brown & Sharpe vise came with the South Bend 11" lathe (click here) I recently acquired. The vise is more suited to milling machine work but somehow it ended up hitching a ride with the lathe. The saying, "It has seen better days" is an understatement.

In addition to its holy appearance, I mean, holey appearance, it is also covered in grinding dust.

Oh, and what's that? A piece of metal brazed onto a broken corner.

And a crack down at the bottom left of the vise.

Someone at some point had filled in the holes with brazing material, but that had also been drilled into and was starting to flake out, so I broke out the loose chunks.

Yes, the end of the screw is also broken off.

Yummy.

Towards the upper left corner of the moveable jaw are the maker's name.

Here's a better photo of the broken end of the screw. This poor vise has seen its share of abuse. Is this salvageable? Yeah, I think it is.

I'm not sure what happened but I failed to take photos (!?!) of the screw getting welded up. Basically, I turned down the broken end of the screw, then welded a piece of 3/4-inch bar stock to the end and turned it to final size of about 0.660 in the lathe.

The next step was to make a new end with a 5/8-inch square end to mimic the original design. I'm using the Smithy I-Max 1340 lathe/mill for this job.

Here's the finished part, ready to be pinned to the repaired vise screw. You can see the repaired end of the screw poking out the right end of the vise.

One more view of the repaired screw.

Below is a scan of a page from the Brown & Sharpe vise catalog circa 1945, courtesy of VintageMachinery.org. The No. 21 vise is their smallest but it still weighs in at a portly 26 pounds, including the handle, which I unfortunately don't have. And it sold for $40.50. That was a chunk of change back then.

The next few photos show the finished product. I originally was going to weld up all the holes and try to make the vise look better, but then I thought that I'd leave all the character marks alone and just use the vise as-is. All those marks give the vise, you know, character, and it shows the vise has been well-used (and sadly, abused) in its life.

The jaws still close remarkably tight.