The Drill Press I have owned for some time now is an old Clousing, that I purchased from my father in law for a very good price. The machine was top of the line when it was built, about a million years ago. The trouble is that as time has gone by the table, which by the way does not crank up and down, has been getting more heavy by the week, or so it seemed.
Time to upgrade the beast. I was lucky enough to get a Jet machine in a surplus sale from the University of Oregon at a reasonable price. The Jet Drill Press is 16 speeds and my old Clousing only 6 speeds. and the real reason I bought the Jet, it has a crank up table, score! Another reason to upgrade the Clousing and not just use the Jet is that the Clousing has a 5 inch Quill throw and the Jet Quill only moves 3 inches. Sorry I didn't think to get a picture of the jet prior to dis assembly.
The first thing to do was disassemble both machines and take some measurements. Rats, the stand pipe on the Clousing is 1/8th of an inch smaller than the Jet, This means that I will need to shim the hole in some way to make it a better fit.
The above picture shows the shim stock in place equal distances around the collar that goes around the stand pipe. Then it comes to the actual cranking mechanism, they welded the strip gear to the stand pipe on the Jet so that needs to be cut away and ground down.
OK, got that cut loose, but now it looks like I will need to add a shim of steel behind the strip gear as when allowed to go back against the stand pipe the crank slips. Another issue is that since they had the strip gear welded to the stand pipe, the table wouldn't swing away when needed.
This is solved by welding a ring on the bottom of the strip gear that will slide around the stand pipe and have a stop ring under that to stabilize it and a ring with a taper turned on the inside edge so it captures the top of the strip gear. The above picture shows the ring welded to the bottom of the strip gear.
The above picture shows the strip gear with bottom ring welded on but still needing the 1/8th by 1/2 inch steel strip welded onto the inside of the strip gear as a shim.
OK, I like this and it is working well. I also had to remove the toggle bolt that tightens the table collar, and grind down, in the groove so it would tighten enough to hold the table steady. Next get the head end of the Clousing off of the come along and install the idler pulley that will give me more speeds.
OK, so here is the update. I decided to just edit the last post, rather than creating a new one. This first picture is of the Idler Pulley I added so I could get more speeds from my old machine. I know the Idler is not level, the Iron was thinner where I drilled the hole, so it lets it lean. I'll work on leveling that later.
This next picture is of the completed drill press, I am very happy with the results, or will be once the Idler is leveled.
This picture is from the side of the drill press, I don't think you can see it from this view but the quill does not line up perfectly with the new table. This is alright as I plan on removing metal at the center of the table and installing a wooden insert.
As you can see I kept the old table and just left it down low, as more weight for a lower center of gravity.
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