The Strange Quirks Of Victorian Metal Drills

Last year I sold my nice 1920s Jones & Shipman pillar drill that used to stand about here. The plan being to replace it with this butler drill made in the 1890s. Now the ultimate goal of the workshop is to have everything pre-1900 so the Jones & Shipman unfortunately just couldn't stay, regardless how useful it was. Now this obviously isn't running yet and so I did buy a Grimston bench drill with a rather nice radial head and I love it to bits and it's probably going to stay in the workshop forever. The Grimston has a Morse taper 1 spindle which takes drills up to about half inch and that's fine for my everyday work. Usually I don't often need to drill holes much bigger than that but I definitely do sometimes. Today is one of those times. I need to drill a 25mm hole in the end of this gate clasp so today's plan is to get this back together again and then drive it somehow and get the job done. These are all the bits of the spindle. You can see we've got a feed screw, various thrust washers and the spindle itself. That has to go up in there. There you go. So if you've been following along with the radial project this is actually quite handy because this machine works in a very similar way. In fact it's basically identical. We have a spindle and then a screw and then the spindle is the same diameter as the screw and then there is a turn section here which runs through the middle of the screw which means the screw can then go down and bear down on the spindle and then we have a nut. That should, it's being a pain. Why is that being a pain? Because it's left-handed. There we go Jamesy. Okay so that threads down into the body. We've got a detent there and there's a grub just here so we have to line that up with that. So actually I'm going to do something intelligent and just mark the top of that with some chalk so I know where it is. That's that, got that, there we go. Tighten that up good and then essentially as you can see we have feed applied by the screw and some lock nuts at the top of here which allows the screw to bear back up on it and that is how we raise and lower our spindle. None of these fancy sensitive rack and pinions and that is what I've never tried before. That fits there at that angle because in order to drive this screw which then drives the spindle we have to have a gear on here and a gear on here with the shaft running down to somewhere convenient the operator can drive it. Again exactly like the radial drill this is a very old way. Next I want to install the drive shaft for the feed. The table's just low enough to let me do that. Come on, let's take the key out maybe. There we go, come on, up you go. Just going to put that nut on there temporarily because we're going to have to move the drill away from that pulley. As you know I can just move the pulley. It's not driving I think. Spot on. Okay once we knock out these two two tapered wedges and the whole thing slides out. It should be able to move it all the way over here up the way. I can't take it off the shaft because it's not split but it is very easy to move. There we go and you can just sit there happily until otherwise needed. Now we can properly fit this gear. Nice. Now I don't know if this is going to fit. It's quite close to this beam. That's precise, that is precise. It has a really strange fixing plate which kind of I don't really, god that's awkward. It's basically a little recess cut into the hub then there's a thin plate which screws in underneath the casting, screws to the casting and screws down and that kind of rides in the recess and that's what prevents the gear from being pushed up and then they've provided a wee hole in through the gear and you're supposed to use that to tighten it down. I better go and find an opening in the spanner that fits. Something you don't normally see me do. Wrong way immediately. That's going to take some getting used to. We need to get some power to this machine. Now I have a plan. We can stick a shaft in the lathe I think. We'll move this out of the way and then probably run the fix steady down here somewhere and that should line up and if you put a stick of pulley on end there that'll line up with something. Is this the Victorian equivalent of an extension lead? I think it might be. It's a little bent but I think it will serve our purposes for today. I'm going to put on this horribly rusty pulley and see if we can get him lined up somehow. Luckily we have four pulleys to choose from. We've got to be careful because I think the belt might crash into the feed shaft but I'll have to find out. Let's put a strap on it and see. Oh look at that that's going to clear. What a fluke. I just need to find a belt that's 14 feet long. One of the one one of the roller belts might be close. Oh it's not far is it? I'll have to go around that one instead. I think if we shuffle him over... Nice. Should we try it? The belt looks like it's running slightly off towards the tailstock. Better oil this bearing and then we can see what happens. Running a new machine for the first time never gets old. I think it's going a bit fast. I think we'll try and drop a speed. Thankfully I have all of these available. I don't think we need to go in back here the right way. Safety first. Oh yes what a pocket. Now the only thing that's missing is a bit of power feed. See this set of cones here? We install a small belt and then we can use those to drive the hand feed and it should be self-acting as they would say in the old catalogues. I had a rummage in my random box of random belts and came across this which is extremely close. I'm going to get that cut to try it with some power feed. Now what's going on here is obviously we have drive to the main spindle and we can feed our drill down by hand. We also have power to the hand feed via this gun by engaging this little lever engages in some teeth underneath this work wheel which then drives these gears up here driving the screw and pushing the spindle down drilling the hole. Right so I've re-ground my drill. Hopefully that will reduce the load on it a little bit. What happened there? Okay it's cutting all right now. I think what happened there was sometimes a fresh edge on the drill can grab very quickly and that was just me feeding down too hard. Obviously having hardly any sensitivity or feeling at all on this method of feeding. Let's engage some power feed and see what happens. Gets through! First hole on a Victorian drill, in this workshop anyway. So you've been wondering what this part is for. It's the top hinge basically for this gate that I've been working on and it's just been galvanized. So these two parts get galvanized separately and they don't come away. They don't want to come out now. There we go. So that gets galvanized just as a bar with a radius on the end and then that gets galvanized as a piece. They get fitted together they get drilled out machined as we've just seen and then the idea is uh they are marked yeah that's the top is that that knocks on there this gets anchored in the wall goes up to it and then I use security dome nuts that shear off so they look a bit like a rivet when it's all done and then that is essentially your gate pivot nice and neat. It all seems a bit crammed in here at the moment but there is a grand plan. The butler is going to be about here but turned around to face the other direction and moved in that direction slightly. Once the radial has moved next door I've started scraping the bearings on that so we're getting closer to reassembling the head on that which will essentially be the same as this slightly bigger. The counter shaft will be on that wall over there. I need to make a cone pulley to match it and it will be driven off of the main shaft down to the counter shaft and then across to the pulley and that whole thing will stand about there. I hope you enjoyed that little deep dive into the curiosities of the mechanics of a victorian drill feed system. It is very different to the ordinary quill rack and pinion feed that we're all used to these days. It's going to take some getting used to for me but I think I'll be able to put up with it. I don't do anything crazy or repetitive um the amount of holes that I drill but the same are usually measured in the tens and not the hundreds so it's not that bad and anyway it's great fun isn't it you know keeping these old machines alive. Anyway thank you for watching please subscribe if you haven't already and I will see you in the next one.