Richard's Workshop

Things to Put In It

1. Drill Press Number 1.

This drill press came from Nilsen Electrical Industries when they closed down the site where I worked. Nilsen would have brought it new. The wiring on it would have been done by the young apprentice electrician, Johnnie Bastow (Susie's brother) (so he claimed). It has a 3 ph motor and was in service as a 3 ph machine for some time at Warrandyte. The motor will have to be changed for a single phase one. My mate Buck took it (along with some other goodies)to Apollo Bay to store it for me when I moved out of Warrandyte. I bought some lanolin based rust preventative, as the stuff that the English magazines recommended (Shell Ensis Fluid) seemed to be unobtainable. Buck sprayed this on the bare metal parts of the drill press.

As I was travelling to Apollo Bay at Christmyth anyway, I took a trailer load of materials that might be useful to Buck, and brought the drill press back. The lanolin seemed to have worked. It was a bugger to get off. The lanolin product people sell a special solvent, but that normally costs an arm and a leg, and my legs are not of merchantable quality these days. I wiped the areas with a kero-soaked rag, but that didn't shift all of it. The kero dried off in the sun, leaving a brown stain that looked like rust. I hit it with a fine wire brush in the grinder, and it came off. Interestingly, the heat from the wire brush remobilized the oil and it was wet coming off. Anyway the end result is that the preservation of the surface has been really successful. It is now covered with WD40. (I wonder if fish oil would have been as good. It certainly would have been cheaper!)

Shifting the drill press from the trailer to its temporary home on the trolley in the corner of the workshop wasn't easy. These things get harder when you are past 70. I got it into the workshop all right, using a refrigerator trolley and then the dolly that my stick welder normally resides on. But then how to lift it? It is a good thing that the factory inspector doesn't monitor my peritoneum, as I had to screw down my foo-foo valve for this. The drill press is about three hernia weight.

The trick I used for lifting it is what we railway people call a pigsty.




Stacks of sleepers make good temporary supports. Here I start to build a pigsty under the drill press.




I can't lift it, but I can rock it from side to side or to the front or back, and slip the pieces of timber in.




Up she goes! Now for the real foo-foo valve test...




With the top resting on the bench, I could just lift the bottom end of it up.




In place for storage for when the shed is finished and I am out of Fort Knox, when one of the jobs will be converting this to single phase. The lathe will be a lot harder!