Post Drill Restoration

Hey guys, Tim here, Big Dog Forge. Welcome back to the shop. It's good to see you again. So I got myself a post drill, found it in a yard sale, guy had it, yard art, something like that, and decided he wanted to sell it. 20 bucks. Yeah, it's rusty, it's been sitting outside for several years, but we're going to do what we can to get this thing up and running. So stick with me, this one should be fun. Let's get to it. All right, so this kind of redefines rusty. There's a couple of things that are loose on it. I was really surprised that set screw came loose and that handle came out of there. The only other thing that moves on this, other than the table, is the little advancing dog at the top of the arm. So we got our work cut out for us. So when I started messing with this thing, I noticed that there was a wrench zip tied to the back of the flywheel, which is kind of cool. I'm not sure where this guy got this thing originally, but somebody kept all the parts together. We're going to put it in a vinegar bath, see if we can bust up some of this rust so we can get this thing apart later on. And we're using apple cider vinegar, white vinegar, and water. So we've got eight gallons of vinegar and eight gallons of water in there. And we put this in the blacksmith shop. It's just sitting on a coal crate right underneath the bellows. And this has been here for seven days now. And it looks like it's eaten into the rust pretty well. And the hope here is that it worked its way down in between the shafts and the gears and that kind of thing. And everything's still pretty much frozen up, but we're going to get some of this vinegar off here so it doesn't smell so much like a salad and get some of this rust off. I'm not going to worry about neutralizing the vinegar or the acid, anything like that at the moment, simply because as soon as I get this disassembled, it's going right back into the vinegar. There's that wrench I was talking about, which is kind of cool. You get an original tool. Now this is something I don't suggest you do if you get a hold of a old rusty cast iron thing. Start beating on it with a hammer. There's a good chance I could crack something there, but it started moving a little bit and they were like taps, so it worked out. And you'll see me doing a lot of that on this thing, but the point here is that you shouldn't tap on cast iron of any kind. It could crack pretty easily or break a chip. But in this case, I need to get it apart. There's only so many ways I can do this, and if it breaks something, I'll just rebuild it or recast it or whatever I need to do. But in this case, everything seems to be working out okay. Some vinegar did get down in between these parts and loosen up the rust. I was really surprised how easy this actually did come apart. It took a little bit of work, but this thing was rusted up pretty solid. There we go. And I'm filing off the little divots and the ridges that were left behind by the set screws that hold this thing together. And we get that flywheel off. The shaft comes out and the shaft is actually supposed to spin around inside the housing here, the main body. So we'll get that out and we'll dress up the inside of that body once it comes back out of the vinegar. There we go. These shafts seem to be in pretty good shape. There's some pitting here and there, but it's not too terrible bad. I got a couple of retainer pins that hold the spindle up into this lead screw knuckle. And this big gear has sort of a giant slotted screw holding it in place. It's like a shoulder bolt. And I let it soak with some WD-40 on it for a while, and then saw me add a little more there. And I was really surprised. It didn't take much effort to get that screw to come loose. I had to tap that screw out of that gear. It was harder to get that out than it was to get the screw out of the housing. I'm just loosening things up, giving them like little taps, a little bit of heat on this. And you're going to see me grab the end of this spindle with a pipe wrench. And it's going to leave some teeth marks in that spindle at the bottom. But I'll file those out. It really won't hurt much. Just need to get this thing moving, get a little lubrication on it. You saw me tapping on the back of that gear. It's actually fairly light little taps to just encourage it along. But like I said, I would not suggest tapping on old rusty cast iron like this if you don't have a way to fix it if it breaks. And this took a little bit of time. It wasn't too bad. It was about 30 minutes worth of wiggling and a little bit. And I filed the end down where I tapped on it with a hammer there and a little burr. And this is our keyway drive slot that matches up with the gear. Okay, all the little components into a bucket. The larger components, we will just stack everything back into the vinegar. And this is again, another seven days later. And the bucket that I've got there, that tub is full of water and baking soda. So it'll neutralize that vinegar a little bit. And I hand scrubbed, wire brushed each and every part. And I was very surprised as to how clean all these parts came out. And my little hand wire brush just couldn't get in all those cracks very well. So I did a lot of this with the rotary wire wheel. We've got a little 300 grit sandpaper and some WD-40. And I'm just cleaning up where the shafts ride, getting as much of the rust and surface pitting out of there as I can without taking too much material off. And that worked out pretty well. I was able to hone those out pretty good. And we'll get a coat of paint on this stuff. And we'll start putting it back together. Yes, you heard me correctly. I said paint. If you've watched this channel at all in the past, I build machinery and do things. I never paint anything. I love to see what they're made out of, the old patinas, that kind of thing. But in this case, I decided to paint this thing just to see how it would come out. I wanted, you know, basically the contrast from what it did look like to something that looked newer. And I'm going to paint all of the gears, the cast iron parts other than the body, this sort of silver color. It'll give it some nice contrast. And I'll do the body and the center of the flywheel in black. So we'll see how this comes out. I'm not the big painter guy, but we'll figure it out as we go here. So you're going to notice that flywheel in the back has a v-groove for a belt in it. And that is something we're going to utilize. So there's not much documentation on it, but I was curious as to why they would cast in a v-belt groove into a flat flywheel on these things. So I started doing a little research. I found a young man in Texas who had a couple of champion drills like this that had some small GE electric motors on them, same situation. And I was talking to him and he tells me that he's run into a few that have had electric motors on them. The flywheels were cast somewhere around 1925. It was an option they offered. I have not been able to find any documentation in any of the Buffalo Forge catalogs that I've been able to find. So man, if you've got any information on that, any more information, let me know. The one thing I was able to figure out is that the particular motor they were using was a quarter horse general electric motor. It was used on a wide variety of different types of machinery, including washing machines and things like that, and these drills. So I'm assembling this lead screw at the top of this thing. And you notice I put together a little thrust bearing, and these things in their catalog describe that thrust bearing as being an anti-friction bearing for the spindle, and it gave ease of drilling. So yeah, that was one thing that was integrated into this drill that I thought was pretty cool. And the thrust bearing, there's a few pits in a couple of the balls on this thing after they came out of the vinegar, but it's not a real high speed machine, so I think they're going to be fine. The raceways were in really good shape. Okay, so that lead screw guide coupler has the thrust bearing in it, and the spindle with that groove in the top of it will slide up inside. There's a couple of retainer pins that go on either side of that groove that allow that coupler to bring the spindle up and down, and the lead screw will be pinned in place in the coupler with a set screw. Get the handle on top of this guy, get a set screw in it, and this all started going back together quite well. I was really, really impressed with how tight the tolerances still were. I mean, these things are fairly crudely made, and the tolerances aren't super tight anyway, but it was pretty good. I was impressed. So that lower gear that's on that spindle shaft has a keyway in it that rides along the keyway in the spindle, so as that gear is pushed around by the opposing pinion gear, the shaft is able to slide up and down inside it. Now, you didn't get to see me put that large gear on. I ran out of memory in the camera before I realized it, so I did not go backwards just to get the shot. Sorry about that, but I think you get the idea. That large gear is sort of half pinion gear and half direct drive for the flywheel shaft, and we get this flywheel put back on, and you'll be able to see this v-belt groove. This is actually for a 3 8 inch v-belt, and it was, like I said, cast at the factory that way, and I was able to find a photograph of a champion drill, same fellow in Texas. He said that the drill was unusable, and he was just going to collect the motor, but he did send me a sort of an odd picture of that. I'll put it in here so you can see what I'm talking about. I don't know, but I think that drill probably could have been rebuilt, but anyway, he tells me that this wheel was cast at the factory as well with a v-belt groove in it, and it's early to mid 1920s as well, so this is what we're basing this off of, and I'm going to go ahead and put a motor on mine since I have the exact motor that was on this guy. We'll see how that works out. What I'm doing here is I'm building a bracket for the very bottom of the extension for the table. The table sits on a one and a quarter inch solid steel round that sockets into the bottom of the chassis. It goes down the post that you mount this to, and then this bracket at the bottom is the only piece of this that was actually missing. So I took a few measurements, stacked up some scrap steel, and welded that up. This worked out pretty well. Not the prettiest thing, but it's all the way at the bottom. Nobody will ever see it, so I'm good. You'll see that on assembly. So this is my GE motor circa 1925 from the serial number. This has got brushes on it, which is a really interesting thing, and what I discovered is I got this thing apart. This motor actually runs pretty well. I just want to do a good cleaning on it and make sure that it's going to last for a while. It's got a little end plate, so I'll stick a new thrust washer in one end or the other, and the thing about this motor is it's sort of inside out, inverted. When you open up these AC electric motors, typically the incoming electricity goes to the windings that are in the housing. This is just the opposite. It's got sort of a permanent magnet situation in the housing, and the coils are on the armature. So in researching these motors, apparently they were used for everything from drill presses to washing machines back in the day. So they were sort of a wide use motor. What I'm doing here is I'm swapping the two wires that go to the brushes that are going to allow this to rotate in the opposite direction. In this case, this was pretty simple. This motor only had two wires that could be swapped, and were close enough, and it was pretty obvious as to how that needed to happen. So pretty easy setup on this particular motor to get it to rotate the opposite direction. So I sprayed it down with a little WD-40, break up some of the grease, a little penetrating oil in there, and then I went after it with some electrical parts cleaner. So the centerpiece here, I just cleaned up with a little bit of acetone and a shop towel, obviously. And this cleaned up really, really well. For the number of years this thing's been on this planet, it's surprisingly in really good shape. And this is another yard sale find. I have a lot of yard sale finds, estate sale finds, stuff like that. And when I see something that looks interesting, I'll just pick it up and store it, and eventually I'll find a use for it. And that was the case with this. So I've had this motor for probably a couple of years, and it just happened to be the motor that, from what I understand, was used on these early drills. And these drills have a number of names to them. They're post drills, pillar drills, self-advancing drills. I think the catalog just calls them a drill. You get this thing put back together, and it went back together really easily. Not that many moving parts in this thing. It's got little fibrous sponges at either end that hold the oil for the bearings, and they were in really good shape as well. We've got our little brass rivets back in there to get our identification plate back in place. And we just put an extension cord on this thing. And the cord that came off of it was simply two wires. There was no ground wire on this thing, and that's what I put back on it. But I may add a ground lead to this thing eventually. Okay, let's get a pulley put on this thing. So one and a quarter inch on this quarter horse motor should be enough of a gear reduction. All right, there we go. Give it a shot. Plug it in. And it's turning in the correct direction. It sounds good. There we go. All right. Now we need something to mount all of this to, and this is just a four by six beam. I got it at the local hardware store, and I've marked out where I need all the holes. I drilled them, and then I oversized them a little bit so we have a little wiggle room for mounting. And I'm going to give this a little coating of something called carbon gray. It's just a stain basically, but it'll help seal the wood a little bit. And this will turn a little darker over time as well, because this is going out into the blacksmith shop that is out in the steel building. There's no heat. There's no electricity, any of that. So I just through bolted it onto this post with some carriage bolts. So we just stick the solid in there, a solid piece of round, it's one and a quarter inch, and we tighten up the set screw at the top. And we put our bracket that we built at the bottom and tighten up the set screw in it. We just put some lag bolts there instead of bolting it all the way through. We got some two inch lag bolts holding that in place. And here's our table. It's on a little pivot. You can swing it out of the way. The catalog says you can swing it out of the way and put a wheel on the fork and work on wheels with it. So if I ever need to drill a wagon wheel, I suppose I've got that going for me. Okay. And this is the belt we're going to use, and this is going to mount just above the drill press. Like I said, a lot of these were driven with a leather belt in a shaft drive shop. The belt would come down from the shaft in the ceiling and drive the thing when you engaged it. And I believe it was probably an experiment by Buffalo Forge to cast in these V-belt drive things. But this is what we're going with. I've not seen anybody set one of these up this way. I thought it was pretty unique. I had the motor from the same era, and that's what we're going to do. So the one odd thing about this is it's got a regular Jacobs chuck in it that's newer. It looks as if someone's threaded the end of the spindle and put that on. I could not find any references to where that particular chuck was offered with these. But since the Jacobs chuck was invented in 1902, and this thing is somewhere around 1925, it's entirely possible that it did come with a Jacobs chuck. So if you have any information, let me know. So we're going to go ahead and hand crank this. I've got the belt off the motor at the moment, and that is a three-quarter inch hole that we're drilling there. And that went through that pretty easily. It took a little bit of cranking. You saw the beginning and the end of that, but it got through it pretty easily. Get the belt on this thing, and this screw up top adjusts how quickly the bit will advance. So we're going to slow it down to one click per, and we'll get some oil on this thing and see how this little motor I was afraid that it would be a little bit underpowered for this, but it seems to be doing a job, especially drilling a three-quarter inch hole. It's quite a gear reduction on there, though. We've got a one and a quarter inch pulley as opposed to a 16 inch flywheel. So it's a good gear reduction, and that little motor seemed to handle that quite big of a hole. All right, let's take a little closer look at this. I put the handle in about halfway through and tighten it up just to see what it would look like when the motor's running it. I've got the little advanced dog flipped over so it's not driving that bit down, but this is basically how it looks. And now it's working, and it seems to work really well. This is something I will use in the shop. I am very happy with the way this turned out. One of the coolest projects I've done, I think, and I look forward to using this. All right, there we go. All right, guys, there you go. I have a working post drill, and I'm very happy about that. It's got a motor on it, pretty unique. You don't see those all the time, and it works really good. So I was really surprised it was able to drill holes the size it did as easily as it did. Anyway, guys, I want to say thanks to all you folks who tune in consistently and watch these videos. It's much, much appreciated. So if you're new here, why don't you hit the subscribe button, check out, see what we're doing all the time, and give me a thumbs up, a little like. That'll help out the little channel. I really appreciate that. And if you got any friends out there, then all you guys are on social media now that, you know, the world is pandemicing. So share it. It's easy to do. Just share. All right, and we'll see you next time right here at Big Dog Forge. Bye-bye.