Purchased a first gen 4" double kurt vise from ebay. All seems to work well. Before i put it in use, i wanted to put some life back into it clean, grease, and new hardware with seals, hemis spheres etc.
I know how to remove all the parts, but im slightly stuck when it comes to the "reassembly".
Here is another manual in case anyone else wants to reference it (i know i will). From Kurts archived records.
Picked up some blue paint that should match well with the original kurt colors. I won't be able to paint the majority of it like traditional vises since this is a cnc vise that is made to lay on its side, etc. Having a hard time finding some nice toe clamps for it. Might not go that route, and bolt it up to tooling plate directly instead. Anywhoo! I'll tear into it tonight with pics.
Tore it all apart. Actually pretty easy following the directions. It needs a total of 3 new seals, new socket head bolts, grease, and single bearing.
Overall condition is pretty great really. I didn't see any excessive wear of anything visually. All surfaces look great except for single corner that has a small ding, no problem by taking a little file and stone action. I won't be sending it out for grind since i'm sure that costs as must as i paid for it. I'm going to clean all the parts with a ultra sonic cleaner, file any large ding/dents, lightly stone the mating surface, do a little blue paint action where applicable, grease it and cross my fingers i can get it back together properly. Seems like the re-assembly is the trick to get it timed properly.
Vise body cleaned in the heated ultrasonic tank! turned out great! There was a ton of syrup like grease that would have taken me a long time to remove with solvent and a brush. Tomorrow i'll do the rest of the parts. Also need to pickup a couple taps and chase all the threads, for the new hardware i'm going to install. I think i'm going to call a few local shops and see what it costs to do a light surface grind. If it's not to much money, i might as well. I laid it up on the granite surface and it was extremely flat on its bottom, the sides were decent but i believe a few high spots on the corners from dings and dents could be taken down.
Shot off an email to the local grind shop. $150 bucks and they are going to "grind to clean" up to .002" if required. When i placed it on the granite last night it felt really flat with no rock felt so i believe it should be just a touch up. Tonight the last of the parts will be cleaned up, and the new refurb parts will be ordered.
So after going through a couple seals by accident attempting to clock the vise correctly I ended up sending it off to a service center in California for assembly. Kenbil service center. Since the vise is so old the assembly instructions were practically non existent from Kurt, what they did have was really ancient instructions from the early 90's. Apparently this is one of the first revisions, so the documentation wasn't the best. They only quoted me an hour shop labor to assemble so that's not bad.