Interesting drill press table lift

[Bill D]

I saw this picture in a C-list ad for a farm sale. The place is a huge junk collection.
I think it is a Walker Turner with extra bracing on the back side.
Bill D.

 

[L Vanice]

Drill presses look so much like they can be milling machines if you only add an X-Y table and a vertical feed. Then you find they can't. The next step is to start chasing the weak spots with extra metal and such.

I still recall seeing a friend's father's basement workshop around 1952. He had a floor drill press with a Palmgren X-Y/rotary table. As I recall, the father used it to machine vee-grooves in wood blocks that then got sandpaper glued in the vee. They were used to sharpen engineering drawing pencils. I don't know if the father ever tried to mill metal with his drill press. I moved to a different school and lost touch with that friend. In 1963, I got a new-looking Sears floor drill press with slow speed attachment and the Palmgren table at an estate auction. I tried using it as a surface grinder and as a mill. I had better milling and grinding results from the new Unimat SL I bought in 1964 than I ever had from that drill press. "Better" is a relative word, of course, but the Unimat was a decent machine for tiny parts.

My largest drill press is an Enco (Taiwan) with 3MT spindle. By the time I bought it, I had a real mill. But the drill came knocked-down in a box and I quickly noted that the column was cast iron in two sections and rather thin-walled. Looked pretty wimpy to be drilling big holes in steel. So I bored the column ends to a slip fit for a heavy-wall steel tube that more than doubled the stiffness of the drill column. Glad I did it.

Larry

 

[DrHook]

Is that the Kalamazoo that @cyanidekid is looking for?

 

[Joe Henderson]

My old friend Jack was a patternmaker and was a supervisor in the pattern shop at GD way back. He had a friend that worked in the pattern shop that made a sub spindle that fit on his Clausing drill press and bolted to the quill. He did a lot of small milling with it in his home garage workshop before he died. Drill press's make sorry mills because the spindles and bearings can't take any loads an actual mill can.

 

[1 Jaw Chuck (Chuck Evans)]

Poor mans version of the above.



Side wind trailer jack. Very quick to operate, been using it now for over a decade. Adds a lot of stability as well. I extended the table lock so that both the raising handle and table lock are easily reachable from the front of the DP.

Chuck

 

[cyanidekid]

Is that the Kalamazoo that @cyanidekid is looking for?

thanks for looking out, I appreciate it, but it really is just 3 parts I need, and this is the other side of the country.

also have to say this is an absolutely hilarious thread of drill press kludges!