# What I did with an old drill press



## jgedde (Nov 14, 2012)

A coworker was cleaning out his shed and found an old bench type drill press.  He offered it to me...  Not being one to turn down a tool in any condition, naturally I took it.  It was in pieces, and had some sort of weird pulley arrangement for driving the spindle from a motor mounted elsewhere - a mod someone did at some time in the past.  Obviously not worth the effort to make it work as a drill press again...  But what to do with it?

Well, the first stage was to make some minor mods to the head, lose the motor and pulleys and make a tapping stand.  It's been like that for the past few months.  

Then, after having a need to stamp some numbers in a graduated dial, I decided to take it one step further and make a "Universal Pillar Tool" fashioned after the original George H Thomas design.  So, I made a aluminum block to mount on the upright tube, then made a number/letter stamp holder with two leaf spring loaded ball bearings on two sides of the square bore to accomodate the poor tolerances of the typical stamp set.


Here's the finished job:









John


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## Que (Nov 14, 2012)

dang creative for sure. looks like you've put it to good use.


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## jgedde (Nov 15, 2012)

My version has no plans...  I just had in my head what I wanted, looked at what was in the scrap bin, modified the design accordingly, and started cutting...  

The leaf springs for the ball bearings are 0.015 steel shim stock BTW.

The real Universal Pillar Tool uses a bunch of castings which are available online and the build is documented in the book by George Thomas.

John


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## joe_m (Nov 15, 2012)

I googled "universal pillar tool" and read the results but I'm still a bit confused about the purpose. Is this a dedicated drill-pressed size tool for tapping small holes and stamping numbers/letters?


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## PurpLev (Nov 15, 2012)

very cool. do you have a fixture to maintain alignment between stamps as well?


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## 8ntsane (Nov 15, 2012)

Nice job John,  Now you have a usefull tool.:thumbzup:


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## Jimbo (Jan 23, 2013)

Thank you John,
I am in the process of making a very simular stamp holder and wasn't sure how to deal with the variations in the stamp width and thickness,  Great solution.

Jim


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