Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Drill Press Modification!

Hey campers, Adam Savage here with another one day build from my cave. Today's one day build involves this bad boy, this drill press my powermatic model 1150 which is one of my favorite tools in this shop. It's all covered with crap right now but one of the things this drill press does not possess is a crank for raising or lowering the table and frankly it's problematic the powermatic is problematic um so i went on ebay and i found this now this is a crank for raising and lowering a the table of a closing drill press which is not the same make and model however it's meant for a three inch diameter uh post which is what my powermatic powermatic powermatic that's the diameter of the post of the powermatic so today yeah i'm going to take this drill press bring it out here in the middle of the floor and take it apart i'm going to do with you know a little this old house with this guy i'm going to do a little bit of restoration on this and make it all nice and neat and buttoned up and down and then uh when i'm all done hell's bells margaret i should have a drill press whose table i can raise and lower and lock in place won't that be nice in theory it's this is a big build this is this is going to take over the middle of this shop for the length of today got about five hours let's go first i had to pull the drill press out into the center of the floor uh so that i could have access to the whole thing and then i had to be able to lay it down now i am strong but not that strong and this thing weighs i think 350 pounds uh so i uh i moved it instead of like lifting it or putting it up on a dolly i moved it i walked it like an egyptian uh like i used to use move the glass panels and that that walking that rocking is a really stable way to move stuff if you're used to it uh and even more than that it's really important that you actually push the object away from yourself to walk it like don't move it towards yourself and walk it because then you're underneath something that wants to fall on you if you push it away from yourself to walk it then it's desired failure mode is not on top of you so i made its desired failure mode away from me i walked it to the center of the floor then i put out a couple of film apple boxes and i laid the drill press down on the apple boxes so i could have access to the stock that's when i measured this and discovered that these two closing pieces are just a few thousands under what i needed them to be being cast iron they're fairly easy to bore out so first i chucked this top collar into my milling machine and i indicated it in using a wiggler uh which is a device for finding perfect center and i got it within about 1 000 of accuracy given the structure here i didn't need uh a 1 000 says plenty for this kind of engineering once i had it indicated in it was time to adjust the boring bar so i could pull out those i think i pulled out like seven or eight thousands i think that's what i gave myself a little bit of slop uh and i did that i had to do that same operation three times i had to do it once for the top collar and then i had to do it twice for this bottom collar because uh because i couldn't go all the way through the thing i don't have a boring bar that's long and i don't have a mill that opens up to like 25 inches so i had to indicate this piece in twice just to bore out the top of the bottom um my one fear since this piece clamps on it's got to slice up the back side you put two bolts in and it clamps on gone my one fear was that i was pulling out too much for it to continue to clamp however there is still room in the gap on the back and it holds on stock really nicely so uh i have here now a raisable drill press table and i i'm actually kind of thrilled about it i've been bellyaching about wanting to do this there may be a stage in the future where i attempt to motorize this kind of operation but that's a whole different build um i'm slowly gathering the parts for that and i may do it and i may not we'll see thank you guys for joining me for this one day build our key pieces equipment like our drill presses these are the pieces that tend to get the most ignored it's funny that way they end up being the workhorses that we use every single day like multiple times per day and only about two years ago did i indicate the uh the chunk of my drill press to find that it was out by about four thousandths and uh i had to actually pull out the taper clean it up and put it back in and then i've got basically almost no run out on it but again that's like that's what we do with our workhorse tools my drill press is has a renewed joie de vivre and it's ready to be pressed back into service the chuck fell off now that's not usually that big a deal sometimes under different circumstances the chucks come off after all this is a keyless chuck that uh i think we installed during mythbuster days um and like a lot of mid-range prosumer drill presses this has a jacobs taper number 33 on the business end of the drill press spindle for those of you playing at home my drill press is a powermatic model 1150a floor standing model it's a great drill press variable speed i love this thing but when my chuck fell off i noticed something really wrong with the jacobs taper that interfaces with the chuck now taper tape jacob's tapers are meant to be uh somewhat self-supporting that is that um when the two sides meet they provide their own bond but these drill presses also have these threaded rings to add to that bond and when a drill chuck is chucked onto the 33 taper and threaded on here it's not going anywhere and normally if you're just doing drill pressing like this it doesn't go anywhere anyway but if you try and use your drill press as a spindle sander if you try and put a lateral pressure on the chuck well if your chuck doesn't have the threads that interface with the machine it can fall off that's exactly how that happened to me the reason i am filming this repair is because those of us who have shops and use tools of every stripe often have to repair those tools or replace them and learning which is necessary is really important to your pocketbook and to your overall well-being of a shop honestly so i thought i'd walk you through the process here i discovered that one of the most key and important tools in my shop uh is damaged oh right see okay i haven't yet done a close-up the chunk fell off and then checked this close-up out look at my 33 jacob's taper yeah it's it's fart that is look everything about a taper is that the two mating surfaces want to be pristine they want to be just untouched you want to clean them so well you don't want any debris because if you have debris you have run you'll end up with run out you don't want to run out in your drill press you want a nice tight bond mechanical yeah this tells me that this was run off angle for a long time and there's no like filing this back into submission that is a temporary solution at best so what do i do when one of my key tools is injured well the first thing i do is i start to do a google a youtube search for repair of that tool um and i have almost always found the repair i needed for my bridge port and my lathe that stuff abounds but for this drill press for some reason uh actual teardown videos and repair videos specifically of the spindle are in my opinion i couldn't find them so then uh finding nothing there i did some general watching of videos about repairing spindles and drill presses and that was informative that helped me understand the language and once i understood the language i could look at an exploded parts diagram which i did a search powermatic model 1158 exploded parts diagram found it found the name and number of this part went to powermatic's website where they said enter in the name of your part and we'll find it i entered in the name of the part and they were like yeah we don't make those anymore so the part that i want can't be bought through a parts reseller and i can't find a way to repair this one piece what the hell am i gonna do well i actually got really lucky in this regard because while i was doing ebay searches for bits and bobs of the 1150a powermatic drill press i found a guy who was parting out a model 1150a and lo he was not simply parting out the spindle which would have been nice it's parting out the entire spindle lowering arrangement yeah that is fantastic this cost me 180 bucks and it should fix all my woes and look it looks like it's got the original chuck on here uh again with the threaded part that couples to this threaded part right so i'd be replacing this entire thing um i am open to suggestions by the way if anybody watching knows where i could purchase i'm going to purchase another uh oh by the way right this is screwed which means that inside here is also screwed i can feel it with my pinky this is this is no longer a drill chuck this is a piece of garbage it looks like a drill chuck but it's no good anymore it won't ever fully perfectly couple i mean i guess you could sort of i can't fix this so that's a piece of garbage if you know of a keyless chuck that also has this threaded part i am all ears i'm not above like machining my own onto the end of a keyless chuck if that's the solution that it comes to but i i would really like the ability to use my drill press as a spindle sander without worrying that this will fall off so for right now i'm gonna live with a jacob's chuck and a chuck key for the first time in 10 years um simply because honestly i don't think this has been removed from this spindle since the eisenhower administration um i can see on the collar evidence that it has been removed maybe once or twice over its lifespan but clearly not in a long time so until i find the keyless chuck of my dreams this will have to suffice so how do i put this in right how do you take apart your machine well that's when i do a special google search for model 1158 powermatic repair manual and low i hit paydirt uh honestly even though i do tons and tons of research online it's infrequent that i find precisely the exact thing that i'm looking for but here it is this is this is a really basic model for powermatic they may i don't know if they still make this one but they made this model for decades which means that the repair manuals are very cross-compatible and in this is a literal step-by-step guide for removing the old spindle bore arrangement and replacing it with another one which i now have so we're gonna film this today that was a long preamble okay so let's get started i hate the idea that i don't like throwing stuff out even though i said this is garbage and i really feel like it's garbage i don't like throwing it out it's funny right anyway i'm not going to throw it out right away put it right there uh so let's see what the instructions say here on page basic operation replacing spindles on quill assembly i love this replacing spindles on quill assembly a lovely three-step process so first up is loosening the spring return so hold quill return housing in left hand see figure seven this is figure seven that's the quill housing number b all right and loosen lock screw a lock screw a okay so i'm looking at this from the underside lock screw a is that guy right there let spring unwind slowly by allowing housing to turn in hand ah okay that's an allen key in there so i've got to go get that out nope let's see if i got it on the second try nope all right i just cannot get out these okay so oh you know what i want to mark that let's mark that there because i want to bring it right back to that location there is a whole separate part of the repair manual for putting back in a spring and i will look that up once i'm repairing this okay there we go letting it unwind that's one turn that's two turns and ah now the okay so from tension it's twice around loosen set screw c and figure six and remove nut on bottom of depth stop rod oh okay see let's see if i get this on the first try hey i did okay oh come on right i got it uh it turned out i was right yeah the drill the uh the set screw had munged the edge here of this little channel meant for it and thus it was not releasing itself so now i have the depth stop rod off of the spindle what's next lower coil assembly to the position where the turret pinion shaft e okay this is the turret pinion shaft and i'm supposed to lower it until it can be removed but let's pull this out just see apparently there's a depth to lower this to in which this can come out so let's just see if i can get there ah okay i see another so uh one thing that i'm dealing with is i may be using a manual for a machine that's slightly a different vintage than this so it appears that there is a right there's a nut i missed here it seems to hold let's see if this works as advertised and that's that one wow ladies and gentlemen oh wow that is far out man that is that is way simpler than i thought it was going to be holy cow okay so pop that out and now this look at that holy um i would say at one point jamie's variable speed drill press uh it wasn't me that broke it it was not me that broke it but he had a big deming bit on it and the deming bit caught on a piece of material and bent and bent the whole spindle shaft and i remember one of jamie's guys brad spending like days taking apart this thing so i've been terrified of this repair i had no idea it was like loosening four screws and then this whole thing would just drop out um this is awesome uh that's great and let's just see let's just see yup they are in every way the same exact part um except that the one that i bought looks way better than the one that's been in my machine forever this is this is really nice i i i okay right so that's where you lower it to and that allows you to pull out that whole business oh look at that and that's the uh oh i see said the blind man now i get it as long as i'm uh taking this thing apart i figure i might as well go through the parts and the pieces and make sure they're as clean and in good shape as they need to be some wd-40 okay oh man decades of crab caked in here do it's time to reverse the order of these things and to retire once and for all this spindle and replace it with this one i cannot tell you so this is the other thing is that in the manual they talk about checking for play there is no play this spindle is in fantastic shape and this to be honest i mean if you look at this drill chuck you can just see like yeah this didn't spend its life at a school let's just put it that way where tools get really abused a light film of oil applied to the quill into the column yes i'm just gonna give this a little spritz and this too great and yeah that's a light film that seems tougher than it should be 2.185 2.5 2.185 and the original is 2.185 they have the same measurement so there's no reason it shouldn't go back in let's loosen this because i'll bet that that is germaine too yeah i'll bet that's exactly i'll bet you tighten this until you've removed all the play you know there's another thing i'd like to say about good tools is that one of the reasons you invest in good tools one of the reasons to pay real money for good tools is uh the ease of repair the better tool companies to be honest make their tools easier to repair um i'm a big believer in the right to repair movement i think it's really important that we get to uh that we get to modify ourselves the things that we purchase um i've been a staunch supporter and they've made great strides in the states in the past few years uh on the heels of john deere attempting to sell farmers farming data without their concession uh but the latest fight for right to repair is in hospital equipment and uh ifixit is dealing with that right now along with my great friends at the eff um but all this uh a long way of saying the best tools are the ones that are the easiest to repair and powermatic honestly they've made this impressively simple as a transaction all right come on oh yeah perfect yeah thank you yep okay so still i'm not getting any movement you know what i kind of wanna there we go okay that was a little better uh i want to get a dead one all right uh i had too much garbage on the table of the drill press and it's actually making it hard to work so i'm going to move over my parts and pieces and as always i follow robert pearsig's advice from zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance which is to place your parts in the orientation in which they went into the machine or it came out of the machine so you have the memory of where they're supposed to go all right so let's move this guy out of the way so what i've what i noticed here is as i was installing it it got tight and then i can tell that this still moves in the column but this is tight and that tells me that my spindle has now interacted with the variable speed pulleys and i'm just like slowly putting it in it's not taking a lot um again if you're going to hammer on a drill chuck you want to make sure that the jaws are yeah the jaws are retracted uh and you don't want to hit it with anything hard gently coax the whole thing back into its orientation oh okay so i forgot i had to put in there oh okay so yeah this is this is a thing i'm gonna get some light oil on you as well and we're going to ladies and gentlemen this goes in like that oh right because i can't get it past that i see right if that's in then it won't move past the right so i gotta get it to where it does get past the oh okay awesome i think it's time to start putting these pieces back together first one is this guy which locks what is this thing called this thing is called the turret pinion shaft so uh this no the set screw that i'm putting in has a little uh a little shoulder on it sorry about that has a little shoulder on it so uh the technique for putting it in is to put it in all the way and i can feel it hitting yeah and then pulling it back just a little bit and then tightening the nut in that exact position and just to make sure that is that's good and i have smooth movement smooth movement okay so the next step is let's put in this guy and you know what i'm gonna get a socket for that my guess is if i tighten this down a lot it's going to lock the spindle all right yep so we're going to back it off back it off that's not enough that's it okay that's backed off until it moves and then we pop in spindle lock that's the spindle lock so that didn't have no it didn't alright so spin the lock yep that's in and that's out great so i'm going to lock that so it doesn't drop down anymore and now now i have to look through the manual for reinstalling the spring because the return spring for drill presses and mills well it can be an area where you can get into trouble time to install the quill return spring this should be interesting i am going to actually install the depth stop first because i want to stop on this i don't want this to fall on me so i'm going to install the depth stop and that will keep this thing from falling back out if it has a desire to do so oh it is so nice i'm literally giving my drill press another 50 years of use with this repair that feels really good okay so now i can feel that my set screw is in the channel and unlike the last person to repair the other spindle i'm gonna make sure it's right in the middle before tightening it there we go that's great excellent now we're also going to get this guy on here this guy goes in here oh let's lower this oh can i say how much i was dreading this repair and how glad i am how well it went i mean you know i don't mean to start singing the praise singing my own praises yet because i there's a lot that could go wrong but right now it looks pretty positive yep plenty of clearance let's give that one more little yeah it's wonderful good now it won't go anywhere and what i can do is i can adjust oh right right right so uh the flats on this thing are on the underside of let's see they're at 90. okay so there's two flats on the spring return here and they're at 90 degrees to the starting hole so i'm gonna go up right right right oh yeah let me get this up in there first this is the set screw which will now my set screw is ready i'm gonna wind this once and i think if i wind it a second time yeah i think that'll be enough so then i tighten this guy in and because i've made my mark it's back to the factory preset let me pop in this is that it yeah so it is yep okay so what am i forgetting are there any parts here that i didn't start with uh the answer is oh let's turn it on yeah it's a moment of truth sounds good ah so what i will now do is i will hole punch this and put it in a binder that i keep said binder has all of the repair manuals and instruction manuals that i have gathered over the years for all of my tools i appreciate that all of this stuff is findable online and yet nothing beats a hard copy and frankly now i love the fact that these two pages where i did the work have like my grease stains all over them this now tells a story of a successful repair this beautiful machine is ready for another 30 years of active duty service that is just great just grand and um yeah i'm really pleased thank you guys for joining me for this one day shop repair uh and if you have other uh other resources for tool repair manuals or aspects of this uh of this repair that i mentioned but clearly don't know a certain key thing about please let me know in the comments there we go see you guys next time thanks for watching that video if you'd like to support us further you can head over to our merch store and get a poster like this one this is my sketch of a gauntlet but it's not just a sketch of a gauntlet i use drawing as a tool for figuring out problems and i have drawn this to help you solve the problem of how to make a gauntlet i've made it a kind of instructional and pattern guide for making an entire gauntlet from scratch but you don't have to you could just frame it and hang it on your wall if you like the choice is yours it's printed on a beautiful heavy cardstock and you can purchase your own by following the links below

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 365,320

Rating: 4.9495459 out of 5

Keywords: tested, one day builds, adam savage, one day build, adam savage one day build, adam savage one day builds, adam savage tested, adam savages one day builds, lathe, making, one day build adam savage, adam savage builds, adam one day build, one day builds tested, one day builds adam savage, tested adam savage one day build, drill press, modification, mill, drill press repair, drill press mod, machining, lathe projects, drill press crank

Id: m-ayU2GCQ_Q

Length: 34min 50sec (2090 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020