Pedestal Mounted Vise

You guessed right. I am married. Will be 59 years in June.

If the inserts were near a wall, they would fill up fa> Leon Fiskirly quickly. But they are in a pathway, not an area where I normally work.

Dan

i have a similar vise in my blacksmith forge.

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Find the past 25 owners and give them each 10 lashes for the abuse.

Ooh, those are _sweet_, and oh-so crisply edged! Are those about 2' tall?

Thank God for tool p*rn.

Where parallel jaws are critical, not well. I do have a machinist's vise.

For when they're desirable but not critical, I usually have temporary, slip-in 3/16" aluminum inserts over the jaws that add a little forgiveness. Use them most of the time unless having the sharp edge of the iron jaw is important for something.

Just so.

Forging is mostly what I do except for general repairs around the place. And the bench-mounted 6" leg vise suffices for most of that.

No, sorry. This looks pretty much like a machinist's bench vise except:

• No jaw inserts + Contact area for the jaws is much larger than usual. + Jaws are much taller then usual, tapering toward the top, giving clearance to file at a steep angle. + No swivel base.

Just so. I saw three in the maintainance shop at the old underground coal mine in Stellarton. The guy who bought the biz bulldozed the entire shop and sent it for scrap when he couldn't get urban collector price for for the old gear -- asked $250K IIRC. They used the vices to hold the ancient pneumatic drills that kept failing. (See the 1910 Brittanica under coal mining for pics of such drills in use.)

Some years later I heard about this vise and drove 200 miles to get it, another smaller leg vise and a Continental engine that I never could get needed parts for.

Yes. Not a powered basket cherry picker, just a manual push-around lift/hoist. Old guy, y'know? Picking heavy stuff up off the floor is no longer my thing.

I don't get that. Have to lift the vise/post assembly ca. 4" to get the post out of the socket. The plate has a 2" hole near one edge. Lift with a pry bar, get a chain hook into it, pick it up.

Present shop has a concrete floor. Could blow down *around* the vise. Original shop was too small to hold such a rig, had a 6" leg vise outside.

A cool old cherry picker would be nice too:

The vise below is foot operated, built similar to leg vises. The second slide is a video. When watching I thought the front jaw insert was loose but now I think it is deliberate to allow the jaw to stay aligned with its mate. One could probably do something similar for the leg vises...

My browser doesn't render instagram but from your text: Does the vise also have a ca. 4"x4" shelf-like projection? Could be a farrier's caulking vise. They have that self-aligning jaw and treadle closure. I had one 50 years ago but swapped it off for some other stuff.

The shelf would have held a "caulking block", a steel brick with acute-angle grooves, used to support a freshly caulked shoe, caulk down, when hammering on the hoof side.

I've also seen a foot operated vise in an optical repair shop but it was an elegant precision tool, far from clunky old iron.

I think that's it. Try these direct links to the static images:

"Wiley & Russell manufacturing Co. Green River no. 3 foot vise."

Here is a direct link to the Hoist video:

I have to download them myself. Don't have enough computer oomph to watch them in the browser...

You know I'm learning the ins and outs of a new newsreader so...

That three legged pipe vise setup was two legs angled out front. 6' long back, with a V cut tube on top and a 3rd leg on the bottom. Very very stable. We cut a lot of pipe and conduit and threaded a fair amount of pipe with it in the field, and I don't ever recall an issue with it moving around on us. I guess it made up for the lack of mass with size. It was pretty big. Now back at the hardware store we used a pipe drive. So much easier. You could cut and thread pipe all day with it. Sometimes I did when a farm would send us a list of precut lengths they wanted.

Yes, that's caulking vise, specialized for forging or welding horseshoe caulks. Never saw one used by a proper farrier for its proper purpose.

Interesting. Thanks for the info. I'm up in snow country and like old odds & ends. I've seen several different versions of caulks through the years. My Dad use to call them sharp shod, or something that sounded like that. He hauled logs out of the woods with a team of horses in his younger years. If you dig around in old patents you will find a lot of rabbit holes to explore searching on shoe caulks :)

BTDT. Conti parts are as hard to find as dinosaur teeth.

Ditto here, for the most part.

Since my cherry picker legs are less than 4' apart, and only a few inches off the ground, I thought yours might be the same. OK, so with the post hole you'd have to lift it by the side, but isn't it top heavy? Sounds ungainly, but you didn't mention rigging.

Nah, just tie the top corners to the assembly.

Or not, since it likely wouldn't weather a hurricane.

Nice for nostalgia, but I'll keep my Chiwanese picker, thanks. He'd do well putting some moly grease on the teeth of those gears and some lube on the shafts. I oil old chains, too.

I like the pair on the garage floor much better.

Drawing and quartering for that new buyer, methinks.

That's about it. On mine, no swivel base, the upward taper of the jaws is more exagerated and it's probably numerous decades older than that one.

Tnx,

I once had a draught horse that was falling to his knees on ice so I got a farrier to put shoes on him. They were old but factory made to take drive caulks -- one end a tapered cylinder to wedge tightly into holes in the shoe, your choice of blunt or sharp edge to the ground. I still have the tool, rather like a small ball joint splitter, for removing the caulks from the shoes. I once had a couple of boxes of the drive caulks but they've gone walkies sometime in the last 50 years.

I presently have a bucket of premade (but hand made) toe caulks in 3 or

4 sizes. Each one had had a little pointy spur turned up at one end. You could heat the shoe red hot, hammer the caulk in place. The cold spur would drive into the hot shoe and hold the caulk in place while you fluxed and reheated for the forge weld. Hadn't heard of that refinement until I got the bucketfull from a retired marine smith who also did some shoeing.

Only a few inches off the ground but not wide or long enough to reach the vise/post in the center of the 4'x4' plate without rolling up onto the plate.

The only mod to the 4'x4' plate that doesn't lift off is a ca. 4" high square steel socket for the 4"x4" post and a smaller round one for the vise leg welded close to the center of the plate. Picking the plate up by the edge with the vise/post unit removed and stowed is little different from picking up an unadorned piece of plate. The lift hole near one edge *does* have to be centered in the edge.

Yes. He wasn't the only one like that. The next to last manager of a shipyard & foundry in Liverpool, NS, would smash any gear they were disposing of before putting it out by the rail spur to go for scrap. Saw a perfectly good 25# Little Giant/Jardine hammer that had been intentionally smashed before scrapping. I'm guessing the idea, left over from pre-WW I notions of sharp business practice, was that it would prevent anyone, perhaps especially their own employees, from getting a leg up on competing with them.

(The good news there was that the d*****ad retired (or, one can hope, was unceremoniously shitcanned by the owners) before they disposed of the 300# Beaudry and his replacement, the last manager before the biz closed, did sell it to another blacksmith in good working order. It's still in use over in the Annapolis Valley.)

Yes, half-hanged, drawn & quartered.