Changing Frankenvise's Neck Bolts

One of you nice readers sent me some self-adhesive magnetic strips so the constantly falling down aluminum parallels could be used.  The Sherline vise, which I find clumsy to use, is aluminum, so these helped not at all.  Frankenvise, a squared up 4" drill press vise, had a valley at the bottom of the fixed jaw that made them useless for another reason: they would fall down into the valley.  So I milled the vise until the valley was largely gone (milling away the mesas and cutting the cliff's overhang on the fixed jaw).

 

Yes, I used a roughing mill so there are a series of lines in the fixed jaw, but that provides more grip (that's my story and I'm stickin' to it). How flat is this?  Left to right is +-.01"; front to back is +-.005".  This is not a precision vise, but for most of what I do that is good enough.  Those ridges on the bottom face are cosmetic; they do not show up as the dial test indicator goes across them.  If appearances mattered, I would take my fly cutter to them, but that hole on the right side makes cosmetics irrelevant.  The casting was clearly irregular and that section was thinner than the left side.  But anything there is supported by the rest of the fairly flat surface so it's ugly but functional as you would expect from something named Frankenvise.  And yes I have already used parallels with it.