Thread: Eggbeater drill rehab

I picked up a Stanley/Fray No 3 hand drill from the local iron monger a while back and decided to do a complete restore on it last month. As the drill was non functional to begin with I opted to give it the works. In addition to the large amounts of overall rust the jaws of the chuck would not close completely.
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At first I tried unscrewing the chuck off the threaded rod but it would only go so far before stopping. The next step was taking the chuck apart while still attached which was pretty straight forward. There was a small set screw that held the 2 parts of the shell together. Then things got a little weird. The reason it wouldn't unscrew was due to a washer attached to the end of the threaded rod. A bit more investigation showed this was actually the top of a thrust bearing that was missing the balls. The missing balls combined with the rust on the jaws and the flaking chrome on the inside of the chuck housing all contributed to preventing the jaws from closing.
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Measuring the distance across the bearing race and between the washer and the rod it looked like 1/16th of an inch balls would work. While waiting for those to arrive I moved onto the rest of the drill. The next challenge was pulling the threaded rod from the iron frame. Usually this is fairly easy. Just pop out the pin that holds it in place and away you go. In this case though the pin was trapped by a small ridge that was part of the frame. A little bit of heat from a blow torch and some gentle pulling up with pliers did the trick. The handle was stuck in place since the retaining pin was driven in from one side and inaccessible from the other from the ferrule.

With everything as apart as it was going to get it was time to mask the handle and exposed threads, remove the rust and paint with some gentle sand blasting. Seems like an oxymoron but I use a fine grit and a low pressure with the nozzle held fairly far back so it isn't too harsh. The wooden handles were sanded back down with 120 grit on up to 360. Turns out the handles are actually rosewood instead of a cheaper wood that was stained.

The jaws were hand sanded and the inside of the chuck was sanded down and polished with some synthetic steel wool. The ball bearings showed up in the post and a quick test fit showed a lucky guess. Now that things were cleaned up I painted the bits that should get paint and polished the ones that shouldn't. The handles were given a few coats of Ubeaut hard shellac which is pretty durable and doesn't change the color of the wood.

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Reassembly went fairly smoothly and the first test drilling went fine. All told just a couple of hours of work to turn a non functional drill into a smoothly operating one.

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Other than having a really odd chuck design it's a nice little drill. The only time the thrust bearing spins is when opening or closing the jaws which doesn't really involve much friction. My guess is it had something to do with adding a feature to use someone else's patent by making a "new" patented device. The downside of this is it wears on the relatively soft threaded shaft which increases the gap to the washer causing the balls to fall out and the chuck to stop working.