if it's just some surface rust, you might be able to take care of it with some steel wool. as for protecting it, and thin coat of paste wax seems to work well to make it slide smoothly and prevent rusting without gumming it up
Wilton is to bench vises as Steinway is to grand pianos.. Great vise indeed.. RWTF
I was surprised how poorly the Wilton vises fared when tested to extreme limits of strength.
It doesn't sound like the rusting problem posed here was at all bad. I'm still blown away with how well a solution of feed grade molasses does when it comes to removing rust from iron and steel. Nothing is more cost effective either. The only real drawback is that the process can involve soaking the rusted item in the solution for a week or more.
Hard to find a vise made in America these days, although they are out there if you look hard enough and are willing to pay more. From what I can tell there are only three manufacturers producing machinists vise's in the States:
Wilton bullets (e.g. 500s) Yost 108 or 208 Milwaukee/Morgan (seem to make all their vises stateside)
Situation is even worse for our British friends since Irwin bought Record and moved production in search of cheap labor. Looks like there aren't any vises made in England anymore.
For some reason I can't understand I started collecting vises some years back, I have an old Parke, 2 Yosts, a Yankee drill press and several others out in the garage I may restore.
I'm in the same boat. Started with restoring a Parker coachmaker's vise, followed by a Wilton Tradesman, followed by a Columbian post vise, followed by a Reed machinist's vise... I don't have a good picture of post vise, but here are the others. All started as rusty and beat up messes.