...Drilling
Took me 8 minutes to through this mild steel with this:
Steel is thicker than 1/8", but no where near 1/4".
Secret is a properly sharp drill bit, a bit of cutting oil, and moderate pressure on the drill assembly.
It will go through 2" of pressure treated fir in about 30 seconds with a properly sharp WOOD bit aboard.
Price was right~ found it in the back alley behind our place.
I was genuinely surprised to be able to cut steel with it. A search on-line turned up several interesting variations, the most interesting being a dual crank drill press. This bears further investigation...
I had read somewhere that Browning did not steam power his gun shop until the mid 1880's. Pope did the bulk of his bbl rifling by hand. This sort of thing is incredibly interesting to me.
As for the hand drill, it is not completely original. At some point, the crank handle was replaced with a drawer pull.
It took a little modification by me to get it to free-spool.I am intrigued by that manual drill press...
Regards,
Doc Sharptail
Don't see much of those any more, either. SW
