I reached out Steve Frei, owner of Otto Frei Jewelry Tools to ask about your question. Otto Frei has been in business for about 100 years. Steve is the closest person that I know to a jewelry tool historian. He seems to know the history of most every jewelry tool that has come to the market in the last 75ish years and many that almost came to the market.
One of the things that I was curious is about what happened with Vigor tools? They used to be huge.
Here’s what Steve said.
"Vigor RM-1000 power rolling mill is made by someone else other than Vigor. Could be a Cavallin, could be a Spanish made mill. Both companies are out of business, although the Cavallin name may still be in use somewhere in Italy. Her mill dates from the late 70’s early 80’s most likely.
If I saw a picture of it I could tell you.
She won’t be able to buy new rollers.
If the surface of the rolls is bad and that’s why she wants to replace them, then take them to a machine shop and have them re-ground and re-finished. Simple job but she would have to hunt around for a place to do it. I have no suggestions for where to take them. You can call out the hardness and the finish. Might cost $500.00 but who knows. Get out some wrenches and take it apart.
Vigor was the main brand name of the B. Jadow & Sons company, once the largest distributor of watch material, tools and supplies to the jewelry industry. They made a fortune inventing and distributing Super Glue. They use the Vigort brand name a lot on products they had made for them. They suddenly fell on bad times having made a series of bad bets and bad management. Sold to their main competitor, Grobet-Dixon, now called Grobet USA, in the early 90’s.
They sold off the watch material end of the business and then stopped using the Vigor brand name for most items. There are still some Vigor branded products, mostly glue!"
Steve confirmed what I wrote before, that replacing the rollers with different ones will be difficult to impossible. Probably your only option to replace the rollers is to find a comparable mill the same size.
Rolling mills are very complicated to make as they are made of thick tool steel that is hardened on the outside, but annealed on the inside. This kind of acts like a shock absorber to keep the mills from cracking when under pressure. Heat treating them requires specialized equipment. I say that because it’s not like you can get an average machinist to make one for you. Also, it’s important to remember that when you refinish rollers by a machinist because of rust or something you can only take down so much before you cut past the hardened steel into the soft, annealed steel.
You said your mill is a Vigor Spanish mill. I’m not sure if that is similar to a Cavallin mill? I’ve got a Cavallin mill from the 1980’s that I took apart once and got the rollers refinished. Here’s instructions how to take apart a hand-crank Cavallin mill. It’s pretty easy. Maybe that will help you?
LIke Steve said, feel free to post some pictures of your mill. Maybe that will help us help you?
Unrelated to this problem. Steve said that Vigor invented Super Glue. Crazy!!
Jeff