Manufacturing guy-at-large.

Walker-Turner

Added on by Spencer Wright.

Late last summer I took on what at the time seemed like a reasonable project: Restoring an old (1940s) Walker-Turner 15” drill press. I had acquired it for an attractive price (free) but it had a number of issues, including:

  • A pretty bad repaint job, on top of a pretty old original paint job, resulting in paint chips everywhere

  • A missing belt guard, which I was able to replace with an unpainted (and cracked) belt guard

  • A step pulley drive system, which made for laborious speed changes & general annoyance

  • …and 80 years of general wear & tear

Nevertheless, it was a functional drill press and that’s infinitely better than no drill press at all. I got to work.

Few things are less fun than stripping paint, and this project had lots of paint to strip - from irregular and rough (cast iron) surfaces, no less. Much time was spent on this: First with scrapers, then with sandpaper, then with (ew) paint remover, Simple Green, and *lots* of time with stainless steel brushes. It was, to be honest, exhausting, and were it not for the fact that I had already announced the project on Instagram it may have destroyed my resolve. Perhaps the lowest moment was when I wheeled a bunch of these parts - a load weighing probably 150 lbs - to a friend’s shop a few blocks away to use his sandblaster. I spent a few hours there hunched over listening to podcasts, and then left with less than half of the parts in a paintable state.

Defeated, I turned to aircraft paint remover - a deeply disappointing surrender, and one with its own set of challenges. Paint remover is no more foolproof - and much more toxic - than mechanical means of removing paint. I used it years ago once, and did not enjoy the experience.

There was one satisfying interlude here, which was cleaning (with a degreaser and then a wire wheel) all of the non-painted parts in the drill press.

For most of the parts, prep continued with two additional steps. First, everything got a light coat of PickleX, a conversion coating. Second, everything was dried out really well using some hacky methods: A hot plate and a heat gun.

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The drill press’s head got one additional step: Bondo, which was rather satisfying to use but didn’t contribute all that much to the final product.

After probably a week’s worth of work (spread out over a month or so), I finally got a brush out. The primer I was using was horrid, a product that was reduced with methyl amyl ketone and was both thin and extremely fast drying. It went on like water, until it turned to a weird slurry just a few minutes later - a rather unnerving transition.

Finally, the drill press was ready to go back together. At this point I had begun to seriously question whether this project would produce results commensurate with my efforts; the 900 series is after all a relatively small drill press, and I had a growing feeling that it might have made more sense to restore a more capable machine. Regardless, it was satisfying to finally see something more or less functional:

At this point there was one remaining issue: The belt cover. The part, which I bought on eBay, had a crack in it that I wanted to repair and reinforce. I drilled a hole at the end of the crack, cut a piece of low carbon steel to fit on the inside, drilled through the belt cover and tapped the reinforcing plate, and epoxied and screwed the whole thing in place. I then used bondo to smooth everything over, and primed + painted like the rest of the drill press.

And voila: A working, 80-year-old drill press, painted baby blue and equipped with more or less modern fittings. The result was emotionally restorative, and I’ve got a few key takeaways:

  • Paint is never the color you think. It may be pretty, but it’s not what you thought it would be.

  • It really is amazing when replacement parts are easily available 80 years later.

  • If you can avoid repainting something, you should. A new paint job won’t turn out that nice, and it’ll take you forever to finish.

  • This Walker-Turner isn’t the drill press I might have wished my life on, but it’s way more of a drill press than no drill press at all. In other words: It’s pretty nice to have it working.

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