I took the Workmate and gun holder insert over to my friend's house today, where we can shoot in his yard.
The rifles are my Steve Krolick Cossack rifle and my friend's Euroarms Kentuckian carbine. This setup could not have worked better. I left it with him since he has more room in his van than I do in my Xterra. Hell bring it with him when we go upstate in a couple weeks.
This morning I picked up this slightly used Black and Decker Workmate 225 that I found on Craigslist, from a seller about 10 minutes away, and it only cost me $15. I just had to clean off some dirt and cobwebs, and then I lubed all the pivots with Pedro's Ice Wax dry film bike chain lube. I used that because once it dries it doesn't leave behind an oily film that will collect dust.
I'm going to make another gun holder insert and take this one up to my friend's off-grid cabin. He's got a vise we can leave up there as well, and we're also going to make a set of sawbucks to use with it.
Compared with the cheap Harbor Freight portable folding workbench that I already had, this is a lot more robust.
This unit is older but Black & Decker still makes it. If you cannot find a used one they are available at home centers or on Amazon.
The mailman brought this to me today (US quarter for scale).
It's from White Elk Trading in Utah. It's the large size, about 4.7" long. I wanted a small pair of pliers for my shooting pouch but wanted something that looked like it might have been used in the 18th or 19th Century, not something from Lowe's.
I might grind the ends to be screwdrivers, we'll see.
If you mess with guns long enough you'll eventually run into a stuck screw. In the past I've been able to free some of these screws by soaking with Kroil, but other times I've had to drill them out using my milling machine and extract them with a screw extractor.
Another option is a hand impact driver that takes 1/4" bits commonly used in gunsmithing screwdriver sets. I bought this one from Amazon:
I've never used one of these before and it did not come with any instructions for changing which way it rotates. Naturally, it came setup to turn right, when I needed it to turn left. A minute of googling lead me to this short and informative video from Down Under:
The small driver I bought doesn't have the separate coupler shown in the video, but by clamping the narrow part in my vise I was able to change the direction of rotation.
I used the driver today to loosen the mainspring screw on my 1992-vintage Uberti 1851 Colt Navy percussion revolver, which I detail stripped for the first time. (Better late than never. Even though it was full of sludge, because it was oil soaked there was no corrosion. I don't recommend this, for the record.)
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