The icing on the vise!

It's been about a year I think when I started to restore my vise. I bought this vise at a Surplus sale Boeing was having for 5 bucks. It was in production use for many years. It's a columbian vise and it's a great size for the shop. When I bought it it was painted green from the FR prime that Boeing uses for the inside of their skin panels. I was tired of that so I painted it black with some rattle can paint I had lying around. I didn't take much time to do it so it was pretty ugly. When I finished my garage I decided that I needed to refinish my vise properly. I have posted some of this stuff previously but I will do the whole rundown here also. I tore it apart and dipped all the parts in an ultrasonic tank we use for cleaning. It takes off all the paint and rust and grease and anything else that may be stuck onto the vise. Here it is all torn apart ready to be put into the tank.

This picture shows the shape it was in before I started to restore it.

 This shows the inside of the vise. At this point it has been stripped, cleaned, sand blasted, cleaned again and I put on the high temp tape to the areas that I didn't want powdercoat  to be on.

 It's almost ready to be powder coated now.

 It's just been removed from the oven after it was powder coated.

 I polished the handle and some of the other areas and put it all back together. This is the way it sat for quite awhile. I even mounted it onto my work bench but it never felt finished to me.

It looked good and functioned great but something was missing. I decided I wanted to put some old school pin striping on it. There was only one problem. I didn't have a clue on how to pinstripe.  I put a post up on the local VW club I am involved with asking for help with my vise. The president of the club got in touch with me and told me he pinstripes and would be glad to do it. I was excited. I dropped it off to him last Saturday and he called me this weekend and told me it was done. I gave him a very vague idea of what I wanted. I left it pretty much up to him on what to do. I had seen his work and I wasn't a bit worried that it would turn out great. Here it is before the pin striping.

 Here it is when it was done. I had an idea of what I wanted in my head but I have a hard time expressing that. It was a good thing because the vise turned out so much better then what I was expecting. I really couldn't have dreamed up anything better and it matches the shop perfectly. I will let the pictures speak for themselves!

So the vise is finally completed. I love the way it came out. The only bad thing is that it's so nice I'm not sure I will want to use it for what a vise is suppose to be used for. It really is a piece of artwork! Thank You again Brian!