Fosdick Radial Drill Restoration
I had wanted a nice big drill press with powerfeed. This was what I found local and cheap. This is what it looked like when I got it home and below is the nearly completed result.
Repairs
Although this machine was absolutely perfect when I bought it, the morons at the City garage managed to tip it over before I could retrieve it intact. It landed on the traverse handle for the head and broke the boss off. I have already pilot drilled and will tap these holes to re-mount the boss and get the traverse mechanism working again. The finished repair is below.
The repair is not exactly as stout as I would have liked, but it beats nothing. In my home shop, it will survive. One of the 3/8" screws is visible, as is the collar on the boss. The shaft housing was severely cracked on the outboard end. The broken pieces were brazed back in place and then the end of the housing was threaded in my 1918 L&S lathe. A mating threaded collar was screwed down over the brazing and that was that.
The left hand shifter in this picture was completely missing (see the before pic above). Apparently this machine had been run in one speed for decades as the remaining shifter took quite a bit of coaxing to get out of backgear. The existing shifter was removed and copied using the big L&S and my Jet9x20.
De-mucking
Apparently, the big drill had been in a dirt floored shop for many years and had never been cleaned in any way. The brown staining in the before pic was a muddy, oily goo that could not be removed by de greasers. The mud had to be scraped off before cleaners would have any effect.
That was nothing compared to what was in the gearboxes. They had 1/2" to 1" of black sludge in the bottm, on the sides, and even on the top of the cases.
This is the multi-speed tumbler gearbox below. There is a planetary setup on the output shaft with an over-running clutch. For lowest speed range, the tumbler is lifted out of engagement in any position and the planetary takes over. Lowest speed of 49-512rpms is through the planetary, while top speed of 122-1220rpm is to the extreme left side. The dual shifters on the head provide the full range of speeds.
This drill is a lot older than I had originally thought. I had figured 1940s. Pictures of WWII era machines showed the motor mounted on the back side of the arm, opposite the head. WWI era machines had square box-way columns, so this undoubtedly lies in the middle, in the strange time when machines were offered in both line-shaft and electric versions. It retains the complex line-shaft drive arrangement that allows the spindle and arm raising power to be fed through the back of the column by a single motor, but has the round column. The motor and transmission mount is a huge bolt-on cast iron plate that weighs a few hundred pounds alone.
The motor power actually makes a 180 degree turn through a big spur gear drive box and then through the tumbler, out of the tumbler, 90 degrees up the column drive shaft and then 90 degress to the head, whee it makes ANOTHER 90 degree turn to get down to the spindle. Not the most efficient transmission system in the world. Also an OSHA nightmare with all the exposed moving parts that simply cannot be protected adequately.
Below is the motor drive arrangement.
Tilting Table
Radial drills typically comew with a huge box shaped iron table that has a flat top and one side equipped with T-slots for mounting work on edge. To drill large parts mounted to the base, teh tabel must be removed by forklift or similar and replaced when smaller projects are to be done. Angled holes are done with adjustable angle plates or by blocking work to the proper orientation.
One of the most unique and desirable featires of this radial drill is a column-mounted tilting and swinging table. This is just like the table on a typical el-cheapo drill press in that it can be swung around the column and tilted side to side or angled holes. The difference is that this table is about 3ft long and weighs as much as a small car!
The table is mounted to the column with a HUGE banjo fitting looking clamp arrangement. Loosening the banjo clamp allows the table to be rotated around the column for positioning or to move the table out of the way for drilling large parts mounted directly to the base. On the outboard end is a steady rest so the table doesn't deflect downward with a heavy load or under heavy drilling downfeed pressure. The tilt locking handles can be seen at the steady rest and just under the back end of the table. Large diameter cylinder with sliding handle to the left side is the worm drive for the tilt... a requirement for handling this much iron safely.
Fun Stuff
This was not nearly as complete a restoration as the L&S lathe, primarily due to the complexity of the machine, lack of information (to get it back together), and the overwhelming weight of the components. I fixed what was wrong and slapped a paint job on this one.
Some of the more amusing parts were cleaning the sump and motor. Cleaning the sump was about like pumping a septic tank, but there was no pump involved. 70 years of muck, water, oil, cigarrette butts, toothpicks, ketchup packets, and a nearly fossilized pork chop bone were extracted by hand. YUCK!
The motor was also very nasty. It had circulated the goo mentioned before and it was all in the in the windings. A good bath in mineral spirits helped things out. There was also a chicken leg bone in the end bell on one end.
The old Plunkett milling vise on the table is going to be cleaned up and put back in action, too. Boy, had it ever suffered at the hands of the past "mechanics" who were in contact with the machine. It is the type vise that has a screw running all the way through the loose jaw and into the other end. The reason it is called a MILLING vise instead of a DRILL PRESS vise can be clearly seen in this picture where the screw had been drilled completely through, requiring them to weld it back together.
Along with the nastiness in the sump, there was all kinds of stuff jammed in the T-slots of the base. One of the more interesting was this big drill bit.
I really would have liked to have seen this happen.
As is related by the WD can, this is a 1" drill bit that was snapped off like a carrot.
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