One of my vices is vises, Marsland

   This vise was made by Marsland Engineering, an innovative electronics firm operating in Kitchener Ontario. Stanley Marsland started out repairing radios in the late 1920s as a teenager. The company grew into an electronics manufacturing company and produced components for the war effort. In 1942 he shifted gears by running two factories for Roller-Smith Co. in Pennsylvania, making sophisticated electronics for the US military. He must have been paying attention, after the war, he returned to Marsland Engineering and continued in the high tech military equipment field, subcontracting to Canadian General Electric, Canadian Westinghouse and Litton Systems. 

  All this seems unrelated to vise manufacturing but in the 50s Marsland purchased an unnamed mining supply company in Cambridge, and was producing hardware like valves, fittings, pipe wrenches and vises. This vise looks like a copy of a Record product so perhaps the design was licensed in. This type of metal casting and forging seems like an anomaly in the predominantly electronic business of Marsland Engineering. 

  Marsland became a subcontractor to IBM during the 1960s, turning the company into one of the largest employers in the Kitchener/Waterloo area. The late 1960s also brought union activity, and political unrest. The government was proposing 100% capital gains tax, in response, in 1969 Stanley Marsland sold out to Leigh Industries, an electronics and aerospace company in Carleton Place. There may also have been health issues...

 Leigh Industries expanded rapidly during during the eighties, buying up too many smaller companies and went bankrupt in 1990, and the Marsland company disappeared. 

I just realized I should really have posted this as a "We used to make things in this country..."

 (The above information comes from an article at ChuckHowett.com, and the book, The Marsland Engineering Story: Innovators and  Entrepreneurs (Waterloo: Marsland Centre Limited, 2024),