The Home Machinist!

So not too long ago about a year ago my son was moving into this new home, well new to him and he has this old shed out in the backyard. Within the shed I found this really scary looking drill press it’s stood at approximately 7 feet tall 6 1/2 maybe. It had the look of, War of the Worlds, it reminds you of lost in space. It was Mankey it was old it was seized up it wouldn’t work, umm, But it was vintage. And I personally love vintage tools. My grandfather God bless him taught me every little thing he possibly could which is considerable considering I’m kind of kind of a Novice and very lame when it comes to things like this, but nevertheless I never lost my love for the tool; never lost my love for the device; the tear down the rebuild; the paint! My question is this, does anybody know where I could possibly get, or even rebuild the gearbox!? I’m gonna post some pictures I’ve done everything that I can with my very limited resources and I’ll be honest with you I think there’s a lot Missing from this piece however I have it the motor works just fine it was going too, but the gear that I broke during the course of my trials and errors I broke the high speed low speed of switch in the front, the other, night.Any help any ideas and advice be greatly appreciate it falls again you know I’m just doing this room from the love of tool , and an old man I’ll never see again. Not in this life

I just checked the Old Woodworking Machines website, try this for information. http://vintagemachinery.org/mfgindex/de ... 9445&tab=3 to see if anything there matches up with what you have. However your descriptions are too vague, gear box to me means it either has some type of geared spindle drive or power down feed. Is that what you mean or are you talking about the table lift? Exactly what parts were or are still seized up and broken? Questions like this are just about impossible to answer about how successful you might be finding, possibly modifying parts to make the repairs and get it back in operation. What other machine tools do you own? Lathe, mill etc? And how much experience do you have if you've got them?

Most sub 1,000 lb drill presses are a fairly simple collection of parts, but properly rebuilding one may not be depending on what's worn, how badly, what might be broken, what machine tools you have etc. And without someone having lot's of first hand experience with that particular model of drill press it's again impossible to give any real advise. Fortunately for you that manufacturer appears to have made some fairly high quality equipment. Unfortunately they don't appear to be all that common so any spare parts from stripped machines on places like Ebay might well be non existent unless you get very, very lucky. I can confidently say if your breaking any parts during disassembly you need to stop and totally reassess your current methods. Run a Google search about rebuilding old machine tools and there's vast amounts of information or even Youtube videos showing the best methods of getting frozen or rusted parts disassembled without doing irreparable damage. The rarer a machine is and that DP seems to fit the description the more careful you have to be.

To be perfectly honest when I say novice, i’m being utterly sincere. Now, I was actually up considerably late last night, attempting to put most of it back together and I got a working believe it or not. As for the gearbox your box on speaking of would be the actual spindle attachment on top of that which the motor connects to via a belt. I thought the gearbox itself was bad, turns out it was not what you had mentioned it was a broken part inside.Which I was actually able to fabricate myself with a grinder and a welder LOL

As to the second paragraph of your reply, with the upmost respect and sincerity, I thank you for your words of advice. I was ironically able to get everything back together and working and will post a video here shortly if far if the website allows

There is a 1968 model 801 for sale for $2450. https://www.ebay.com/itm/292182076136?c ... 630c47d85d