Champion Forge, should I restore it?

[Purple Bullet]

On 1/14/2023 at 8:45 PM, TWISTEDWILLOW said:

I have some good post vise bodies that are missing the screw and screw boxes if your wanting to go that route,

How to go about that might be worth another thread, but I thought I’d mention something that may be a good replacement for the screw and screw box. Back when I was diving, we did a repair on the Old River Control Structure that fed the Atchafalaya River from the Mississippi. We used something called doo-wah dag bolts to fasten down 20 ft X 20 ft steel plates over damaged concrete from the base of baffle blocks to a stilling basin wall. The cavity was then trimmied full of grout with millions of steel needles. We used rock drills (a real bear to use underwater) to drill into that super hard concrete. Then we put “sausages” of epoxy with a strip of activator in the hole, forced in a length of rebar that had ridges on either side that actually formed very coarse threads. We spun that with an impact wrench to mix the activator and let that set up. The nut had a rounded bottom and the washer (made from 2” thick 4” square steel) had a cup machined into it that the nut fitted in.  If you could find those it would make a real good replacement screw and screw box. BTW, the next year I went back to inspect it. Most of the 1/2 in thick steel plate had been ripped up by the current like so much tissue paper. The grout underneath was smooth and sound.