Does not follow...

[HTRN]

You don't need that for pouring ingot bars. Ideally you're pouring long thin ingots that can fit in your nice clean electric pots.

If you have to buy new, Horror fright has a dutch oven for 70 bucks, bit they periodically go on sale.

Another option is this;
https://www.academy.com/shop/pdp/outdoo ... atid=27870

[MiddleAgedKen]

As for cars... Go high or go low, in between is just squish and boring. Ford or Lincoln, not Mercury. Dive joint burgers or surf and turf, not Denny's.

Generally yeah, but I wouldn't sneeze my nose at a '68ish Cougar or an '03ish Marauder.

[HTRN]

Aaaannnndddd it's gone

And now there is a bullet master up for sale for $2650, which is extraordinarily cheap - admittedly they're currently up to the mk8 version it's still roughly 1/5 the cost of a new one..

Anybody want to guess how high it will go? Im certain it's going to go over 5k, and I think it's has better than even odds of going over six...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Magma-Engineer ... 890.l49286

[Netpackrat]

I think I finally succeeded in buying a used Kurt vise on Ebay yesterday. I had done so once or twice previously only to get the usual demand for $200+ additional shipping Because Alaska. The guy yesterday I wrote back and said that the $85 shipping I had already paid per the listing should be more than sufficient, and suggested taking it apart to get the pieces under the 70 pound minimum for flat rate shipping. He didn't reply but Ebay sent me a couple of tracking numbers, so we'll see. Judging by the pictures, this is probably the least chowdered Kurt for the money that I have seen so far, so I am hopeful.

And yeah, I probably should have held out for a new one. What wasn't apparent in the pictures, is the vise was apparently owned by somebody who liked to adjust it with a ball peen hammer or some such. So the machined surfaces are a mess. The important ones are OK for the most part and it will be usable, although getting full travel out of the screw took some doing and I had to order a rebuild kit because there were no bearings.

My friend bought a surface grinder last fall so eventually I can probably get it made right, but he says it will be a while since the grinder is a full rebuild and needs to be rescraped, etc. But in the meantime the vise will at least work and do what I need it to do. Electrician is supposed to be here next week to do the garage wiring, so I will finally be able to use my welders again and not need to use the generator to run the lathe. So getting the VFD for the mill set up and wired will be the next project.

[HTRN]

I think I finally succeeded in buying a used Kurt vise on Ebay yesterday. I had done so once or twice previously only to get the usual demand for $200+ additional shipping Because Alaska. The guy yesterday I wrote back and said that the $85 shipping I had already paid per the listing should be more than sufficient, and suggested taking it apart to get the pieces under the 70 pound minimum for flat rate shipping. He didn't reply but Ebay sent me a couple of tracking numbers, so we'll see. Judging by the pictures, this is probably the least chowdered Kurt for the money that I have seen so far, so I am hopeful.

And yeah, I probably should have held out for a new one. What wasn't apparent in the pictures, is the vise was apparently owned by somebody who liked to adjust it with a ball peen hammer or some such. So the machined surfaces are a mess. The important ones are OK for the most part and it will be usable, although getting full travel out of the screw took some doing and I had to order a rebuild kit because there were no bearings.

My friend bought a surface grinder last fall so eventually I can probably get it made right, but he says it will be a while since the grinder is a full rebuild and needs to be rescraped, etc.

What size vise, and what size surface grinder? If it's a typical 6x whatever, it's not going to be wide enough to do it in one shot. It can be done, but you really have to know what you're doing. In fact, if it's wallowerd out, you may just make it worse - a electromagnetic chuck can pull the surface flat, and then when you grind the top surface, it will introduce a wallow when released. The way to deal with this is to put the vise on a surface plate, go over both sides with a tenth reading indicator, and determine which is flatter. Put the flatter side down, shim it so it won't get sucked flat, and grind the surface. True up the wheel and flip it over and grind the other side. That should get to within .0002+/- flatness and parallelism. If you need better than that, there's ways to get it to better than 50 millionths...

https://youtu.be/CsTbWAu0k-o

[Netpackrat]

I think he said the grinder is a Harig 612, the vise is a D60. It's mainly the tops and sides of the jaws but the bearing surfaces and where the jaw plates mount are OK, so the damage seems to be mainly cosmetic, and the vise will be usable as-is once the kit with the bearings arrives.

[HTRN]

That's a 6 inch by 12 inch surface grinder...

Wait, are you talking the vise, or the jaws? Because a new set of jaws is like $45 from Travers.. it's almost not worth the time to regrind, especially if you have to do more than dust the jaws, especially as the common increment size for parallels is 1/8"...

[Netpackrat]

I already bought the new hardened jaws (what I called the jaw plates in my previous post) since it didn't come with any. I am talking about the removable parts of the vise which the jaws bolt to.

[HTRN]

Okay, if the sides of the moving jaw and the fixed jaw block are chewed up, ignore it - it's cosmetic. The key sides are the top and the jaw mounting surfaces. The jaw mounting surfaces also need to be square with travel of the vise - this is harder to do than it sounds. The top surfaces are ideally ground together at the same time, as it's a location surface when the jaws are used in the outboard locations...

[Netpackrat]

Okay, if the sides of the moving jaw and the fixed jaw block are chewed up, ignore it - it's cosmetic. The key sides are the top and the jaw mounting surfaces. The jaw mounting surfaces also need to be square with travel of the vise - this is harder to do than it sounds. The top surfaces are ideally ground together at the same time, as it's a location surface when the jaws are used in the outboard locations...

The tops are not in good shape, with many hammer marks. Not sure what whoever did that was thinking. I realize that what I did is not really the way to do this, but realistically at this point it wasn't going to make the vise significantly worse. So in the interest of making it usable, I took a big mill file and knocked down the high spots, and followed that up with a stone. Not going to put any more money into this. I just want to make it somewhat usable until such time as I replace it with the new one I should have bought in the first place. Here's an after picture; I didn't take any before pictures although I should have:



The blocks are just setting on top for now since I can't assemble it until the new bearings arrive.