#toolrestoration — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #toolrestoration, aggregated by home.social.
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got a new blog post about a project of mine. This project is a restoring an possibly 100 years bandsaw machine.
https://www.dragon.engineer/post/bandsaw-restoration-part-1-collection-and-assessment
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Follow-on to my last post about my stand-up hobby workstation. You weren't imagining it. This is an "Expanse" themed drill press, right down to the MCRN property identification tag! Yes, there's a story.
Back at the end of the last century, when I bought the run-down little 1943 house on the Oregon coast where my wife and I live, my dad showed up from back-east to help with repairs, and brought suitcases full of tools, hardware and parts from his own shop. I had only a few tools of my own at the time, and so this was mostly really useful stuff. But I didn't know what to make of this toy-like drill press that he gave me.
It was from KMart of all places, a long defunct discount department store chain in the US, known more for prices than the quality of their goods. The housing was not only plastic, it was BEIGE, like some kind of 1970 kitchen appliance. Surely it was junk. Dad helped, dad left, and the drill press went into the back of my tiny, cluttered garage, where I never had a space or reason to set it up. Then a storm blew part of the roof off the garage and lot of things were water damaged, including the drill press. We tore down the garage, put anything we could salvage into storage, and set about building a new stand-alone shop building behind where the garage had stood. I ALMOST chucked the drill press at that point, but something made me hesitate, and I put it into storage.
It stayed in storage for years, even after the rest of my tools went into my new shop. I'd see it back there once in a while, and I had some vague idea I could tear it apart some day and maybe salvage some useful gears or something. Finally, during the pandemic, I pulled it out and decided to tear it apart for fun and salvage.
But when I split the case, I was shocked. The plastic held a sturdy and well-made frame, a gearbox with all metal gears rather than the plastic I'd expected, and a nice little motor. Most of the original grease was no longer in contact with the gears and had mostly solidified into gunk, but the guts of it looked good. I scraped out all the grease residue and repacked with fresh grease. I replaced the rotted original power cord and strain relief, and put the casing back together. It worked! I was quiet and strong, and I simply couldn't trash it.
I took it back apart again, cleaned the corrosion off the base and upright, disassembled, cleaned, and lubricated everything. I mounted the pedestal to a store display cork flooring sample that I'd gotten for free from a local flooring store, and on a lark, I decorated it with striped safety tape and some metal trunk handles that I had laying around the shop, going for an industrial look. The drill actually looked pretty good, but that plastic case! That BEIGE! I had to paint it! But what color?
Well, this was the covid shutdown, so shopping was hard. I did have plenty of flat-black spray paint though, so... It looked -- almost as ugly as beige. I decided to experiment with some weathering techniques I'd learned from Adam Savage YouTube videos, and make it look like painted metal that had become worn and chipped. I also added some prop-replica stickers from the TV series "The Expanse" that I'd picked up somewhere.
While I don't know that it was ever shown on TV, in the books Amos Burton can often be found at has "machine shop" in the space ship Rocinante. Now, probably this machine shop is some kind of 3D printing or multi-axis CNC device, but who's to say it doesn't have a little drill press somewhere? Yes, it's absurd, but I thought it was fun, and a bit of a conversation piece.
I'm really glad I didn't throw this away. It was a fun project to restore it and make it useful again. It's not a precision device, but fine for a lot of light drilling tasks, and it goes with my new work station well.
#making #PowerTools #hobby #Workshop #toolrestoration #TheExpanse #KMart #vintagetools #retrofuture #maker #makers -
Around mid 2018, I came across this 12" parks planer in friend's basement among all of his vintage tools. he hadn't been using it and wanted space. so I took it off his hands for a decent price ( combination of money+beer+promis of help is hauling old iron around ). when I got it, it had significant problems so it took me almost a month to tear it down and rebuild it slowly. but after that it served me well for until I had to move back to canada. at that stage, I had to take hard decisions about some of my tools due to lack of space. I sold the planer after coming back to canada and opted to go with one of the lunckbox planers as a practical choice.
Here is video of it in action planing it's first ever board after rebuild. at this stage, infeed & outfeed rollers still needed adjusting. which is why board is not moving thru the planer smoothly. Fair warning.. video contains loud powertool noises. This printer kicks up a racket when it is operating even after filling gear box with grease.
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Around mid 2018, I came across this 12" parks planer in friend's basement among all of his vintage tools. he hadn't been using it and wanted space. so I took it off his hands for a decent price ( combination of money+beer+promis of help is hauling old iron around ). when I got it, it had significant problems so it took me almost a month to tear it down and rebuild it slowly. but after that it served me well for until I had to move back to canada. at that stage, I had to take hard decisions about some of my tools due to lack of space. I sold the planer after coming back to canada and opted to go with one of the lunckbox planers as a practical choice.
Here is video of it in action planing it's first ever board after rebuild. at this stage, infeed & outfeed rollers still needed adjusting. which is why board is not moving thru the planer smoothly. Fair warning.. video contains loud powertool noises. This printer kicks up a racket when it is operating even after filling gear box with grease.
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Over the years, I have had number of vintage tools entrust themselves to my care. some I nursed back to health and sent off on to their new owners, some I kept. I find that I enjoy restoring vitage tools as much as I enjoy using them.
One such toos was my delta Unisaw. baesed on serial number, it was built in 1951. a woodworker in denver area who specialized in restoring wood windows on old houses was moving and I picked it up from him. It had a laguna sliding table mounted on one side and newer 50" fence. but I got original fence as well as original left side extension wing along with it as well. I completly cleaned and lubed it, aligned it and used it for 3 years. But unfortunately had to sell it when I moved back home to Canada as there was no way I was going to be able to accomodate 2 cabinet saws in current garage. so newish 3hp cabinet saw won over 1hp unisaw. Based on serial number, it was built in 1951 in Delta/Crescent Milwaukee factory.
Incidently in the background of second photo is my 1970s Beaver 3401 gap bed lathe on which I first learnt to turn small items.
PS: No idea why I am feeling nostalgic lately but some more of my old tools may make appearence in future posts.
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Over the years, I have had number of vintage tools entrust themselves to my care. some I nursed back to health and sent off on to their new owners, some I kept. I find that I enjoy restoring vitage tools as much as I enjoy using them.
One such toos was my delta Unisaw. baesed on serial number, it was built in 1951. a woodworker in denver area who specialized in restoring wood windows on old houses was moving and I picked it up from him. It had a laguna sliding table mounted on one side and newer 50" fence. but I got original fence as well as original left side extension wing along with it as well. I completly cleaned and lubed it, aligned it and used it for 3 years. But unfortunately had to sell it when I moved back home to Canada as there was no way I was going to be able to accomodate 2 cabinet saws in current garage. so newish 3hp cabinet saw won over 1hp unisaw. Based on serial number, it was built in 1951 in Delta/Crescent Milwaukee factory.
Incidently in the background of second photo is my 1970s Beaver 3401 gap bed lathe on which I first learnt to turn small items.
PS: No idea why I am feeling nostalgic lately but some more of my old tools may make appearence in future posts.