Thread: Restoring a Servian Pedestal Drill press

That's a robust machine Joe, makes the Waldowns look slight. Nice to see you pressured into a refurb.

BT

The old peer pressure trick

Joe

Originally Posted by jhovel

'cheeky' offer to paint the Servian "Waldown blue", I felt shamed into having another go at it

Hi Joe,

Looking good, are you quite sure that Waldown Blue wouldn't look better...

Regards
Ray

.....

Joe

I like the restraint Joe has shown.

I was looking back at the photo of Bryan's Waldown thinking how simple changing speeds would be on a guardless machine. My drill has in intermediate pulley and the locking lever is accessed from above, inside the belt. Sometimes development goes backwards.

BT

Hi Joe,
Looking good. I might have to tart up the Hercus if this keeps up.

Stuart

Originally Posted by Stustoys

Hi Joe,
Looking good. I might have to tart up the Hercus if this keeps up.

Stuart

I've got some Hercus green in a tin.

Hi Bob,
You think I dont have enough half finished jobs?
You're saying it was green? I'd thought it had always been grey. I'll have a look.

Stuart

Bob and Ray,
did you find that you needed to tighten the table clamp more since sanding and polishing the column on the Waldowns?
I managed to get the top half of the Servian column looking quite reasonable, but there is still a lot of dark 'staining' - and now the clamp needs to be tightened a LOT more to stop the table swivelling. It was always hard, but I'm actually worried that I might break or stretch the thread on the clamp handle now. I'm considering maybe 3 or 4 brass 'set screws' around the column collar - or cutting the slot deeper somehow. The cast iron collar is probably worn and clearly doesn't like being flexed to hold tight any more.
Any thoughts?

Stuart,
When I move the Servian next to the lathe and milling machine, I can see what's going to happen next in my shed too - they will look dirty and in need of tarting up too.....
See what you started, Bob

Joe

Originally Posted by Stustoys

Hi Bob,
You think I dont have enough half finished jobs?
You're saying it was green? I'd thought it had always been grey. I'll have a look.

Stuart

I was just saying I had some green paint. They may have been grey. They may have been the blue black colour of my '58 Hercus. I don't know what colour they were originally Stu. They made them for quite a long time.


Joe,

My table clamps on both the Workmax and the 3M work fine with no excessive tightening required.

Bob.

Hi Joe,

Didn't notice any change after polishing the column, if the gap on the locking clamp is too big, you might crack the cast iron. It might be possible to shim it?

Ahh... I think I just figured out what the unused 3/8 bolt hole in the table locking clamp is for.. I think it's to take up the slack if the clamp gets too loose...

The Servian might have something similar.

Regards
Ray

Nearly there!
I finished painting and reassembling the Servian - bar the base, which is a job for this week.





The only glitch I had was that I decided to clean out and bush the motor mount holes in the head with some suitably thin-walled aluminium tube I had. In the process, I learnt why the holes were so far oversize: the holes and the pins don't share the same centre distance
As a result, I got the motor back on a short distance with a lot of effort and ran out of puff trying to get it off again... its stuck until I have a bit more strength back.....

While I had all the right gear to hand, I also decided to disassemble the cross slide vice I had scraped and rebuilt (from new) a couple of months ago, and fettled the rough castings a bit more and repainted it to match the nice 'Servian grey'.

The paint was still a bit soft to reassemble.
Joe

"The paint was still a bit soft to reassemble".

Painting does have a habit of testing one's patience. Reassembly while wet has undone me a number of times.
It's looking the part Joe. Well done.

I should let you know that looking at the backgound in your shots makes me feel real comfortable.

I'm not an orphan after all. BT

What a geat mess of 'useful stuff' huh, Bob?
It rarely phases me but my other half Pam hates it. All she can see is chaos and can't find any screw drivers - even though there are at least 3 dozen distributed evenly and easy to hand wherever I am

By the way, the cross slide vice is now assembled (paint was still a little soft in a few places.....) and T-bolted to the table. Will take a photo tomorrow. Looks nice, even if I do say so myself.

Joe

PS: When I retire later this year, the master plan is to tidy up and clean the whole workshop and paint the floor. After that I probably won't find anything any more