Cool Gadgets

I acquired this at an estate auction just north of Harrisburg, PA. I had to stick with the bidding all the way up to nine dollars!

It's from the early 1900's. Rube Goldberg would love it. Turn the crank and the shaft spins, oscillates side-to-side, and slowly advances. A small brass arm acts as a depth stop - you set it where you want it and when the advancing carriage gets down to it, it disengages the advancing mechanism - it's visible in the middle of the right hand photo. Very clever.

The whole gizmo is designed to be clamped onto the edge of a door for cutting a deep mortise for installing pocket-mortised locksets.

While visiting my in-laws in Harrisburg, PA during the summer of 2001, I managed to hit an estate auction which was just a few miles north of Harrisburg. The deceased had a thing for tools and other "stuff" (can you imagine such an affliction?) and the small house and garage were pretty well packed (hmmm… a man after my own heart…).

Anyhow, among the various items I managed to bring home fer cheap was this very nice old Champion No. 90 post drill. As I recall, I paid $22.50 for it.

The automatic feed mechanism which is often missing or broken, was all there and functional. It had the original flywheel, which is often missing or replaced with a flat-belt pulley or v-belt pulley. It was still mounted on its original board! After letting it (ahem) age appropriately on my garage floor, I finally went for the complete disassembly.

It was pretty obvious how it all came apart, and all went well until I tried to get the quill out of the main casting. I couldn't figure out how the threaded rod that advances the quill downward was connected to the top end of the quill. I noticed that there was a metal collar that appeared to be brass, at the top of the quill.

The collar just spun around the shaft - I couldn't figure out if it did anything or how to get it off. Then it suddenly occurred to me - would it slide down? It did, revealing two pins.

Once I knocked the pins out, the quill slid apart easily from the end of the threaded rod. This allowed the 12 small balls in the bearing housed therein to go bouncing and skittering across the bench and the floor, just like I planned (of course).

To clean everything, I first used mineral spirits and an old toothbrush to remove the grime and gunk. Then I used a wire brush to scrub off the stubborn crud and remove what little was left of whatever finish it may have once had. It appeared that the main casting and some of the other parts had been japanned.

The machined shafts that needed to turn and spin smoothly got a going-over with fine SC (silicon carbide, y'know) paper and WD-40 followed by steel wool.

I discovered that unfortunately, a critical part had been broken. The threaded rod goes through a threaded collar. This is what provides the downward force. Obviously someone had applied too much force at some point, cracking the threaded collar at the shoulder.

The threaded collar appeared to be some sort of cast metal. Without this part, the drill would pretty much be useless. To make a long story slightly less long, I took it to a machine shop and they managed to weld it and machine the weld down to make a very nice repair that's not immediately obvious.

Unfortunately, it cost me way more than I paid for the whole post drill! But I figured I didn't have much of a choice - I didn't think I stood much of a chance of finding a replacement part, and I wanted the finished product to be fully usable.

I washed the dirt off the board with just soap and water, and lo and behold! The original factory-stenciled "No. 90" appeared at the top of the board! I thought this was really cool! I imagined some worker in about 1910 applying the stencil to the board just before the drill was crated up to be trucked somewhere. I liked the idea of keeping the stenciling on the board. Unfortunately, the stenciling was faint, and hard to read. However, I happen to have a couple of old brass stenciling sets of close to the same vintage, and fortunately, one of them matched the letters and numbers very closely, so I made them a bit darker.

I re-painted the parts that appeared to have been painted originally, and just oiled the rest. The board got a bit of sanding, since it was really rough. I gave it two good coats of linseed oil, followed by two good coats of amber shellac. And here it is all ready to drill some holes in metal!