I have a couple of Record 52E vises I picked up off of eBay a couple years ago (shipping from the UK was super pricey). I’ve dismantled one of them to install into my newly finished workbench and soaked some of the components in Simple Green. Unfortunately, it turns out that the Roundel blue finish from that era dissolves rather easy in that particular degreaser – when I pulled the pieces out of the solvent tank, they were a pinkish hue. I’m not terribly upset – it just means my restoration is going to be a bit more involved than I had planned it to be. The blue pieces are currently soaking in a bucket of Simple Green to finish removing all the paint from the rest of the vise.

Once I’ve reduced it to bare casting in a couple days, I would like to repaint (or enamel?) it to be as close as I can reasonably get to the original. With that said, I have a couple questions:
1 – Primer the casting? If so, with what?
2 – The Roundel blue that they were originally finished with is not widely available in the US – what would be a good alternate that is durable and reasonably faithful to the originally coloring?
3 – How to apply? I do not have an airbrush or aerosolizer of any kind (and not particularly inclined to try to play that game).
4 – A few surfaces, notably the front bar used to turn the screw, are basically brown. I would like to return them to the original silver finish they had – should I use a wire brush, steel wool, or more aggressive methods, like a drill with a wire wheel?

That about covers it – thanks for any advice you folks can offer up. I’ll post some pictures of the restoration project as it progresses.