Gui
Member
Hi everyone,
For this first post I wish to express my thanks to all the contributors on this most excellent forum. I have been like a sponge on UKW for the best part of a year, all the while setting myself up with a shed and a few tools, as a wannabe woodworking hobbyist.
I wanted a pillar drill and was lucky (or mad) enough to acquire a Kerry's Works (Leyton, London) 8 speed "Superdrill" floorstander from a gentleman just a couple of miles down the road, a few months ago. It's a great machine, with a striking look (a bit of an elegant brute) and has an indestructible feel to it. It's also doing a great job of keeping the shed from flying away in the wind
I have no idea how much it weights but that has got to be in excess of 400 lbs, easily !
It's usable (and I use it) but in need of a little restoration / TLC. The main issues are:
Before I dismantle part of the head to try and understand how it works (and I believe that requires extracting at least one bearing) would anyone have any information about those Kerry drills please ? It would appear that quite a bit is known about drills from Progress, Fobco, Meddings, Ajax, Startrite, etc... but not Kerry (I only found some info about their lathes). I'd also be interested about the company (when did they operate, etc...), or any information that would help me date my drill. For instance, I found a picture of a 1948 ad for Kerry that shows the model of the drill I have (albeit the benchtop version). But then in those days such designs probably did not need to change for years and the moulds could have been used up to the Seventies, couldn't they ? I could not find a date on the drill, it just has a number on the casting: "650".
Many thanks,
Guillaume
For this first post I wish to express my thanks to all the contributors on this most excellent forum. I have been like a sponge on UKW for the best part of a year, all the while setting myself up with a shed and a few tools, as a wannabe woodworking hobbyist.
I wanted a pillar drill and was lucky (or mad) enough to acquire a Kerry's Works (Leyton, London) 8 speed "Superdrill" floorstander from a gentleman just a couple of miles down the road, a few months ago. It's a great machine, with a striking look (a bit of an elegant brute) and has an indestructible feel to it. It's also doing a great job of keeping the shed from flying away in the wind
I have no idea how much it weights but that has got to be in excess of 400 lbs, easily !
It's usable (and I use it) but in need of a little restoration / TLC. The main issues are:
- the motor (also vintage: it's a 1/3HP single phase 1425 rpm Hoover made at the Cambuslang Works in Glasgow) must have been lifted from some other machine and mounted onto the drill as it was, as the 3 (instead of 4) steps pulley on the motor shaft is the wrong way round, so only one speed (maybe 2 at a stretch) can be set. I need to source an identical-ish pulley to the one on the quill and mount it on that motor. Any good sources for pulleys you would recommend ?
- It should be an 8 speed drill. 4 belt positions, and each can be reduced by a factor of 7.1 (down to 86 rpm, so it should be suitable for drilling for East Anglian oil ) by engaging - with an eccentric movement - a parallel-axis gear reducer. This engages with gears that are placed co-axially at either end of the quill pulley (difficult to explain without a picture at present): on the quill axis, the gear above the stepped pulley is coupled to the chuck spindle (but not permanently to the pulley), and the gear below the pulley is coupled to the pulley permanently. When the reducer is engaged, the top gear (and thus the chuck) rotates 7 times slower than the bottom gear (and thus the pulley) and when it's not engaged, both gears rotate together. I fail to understand how this works exactly, there seems to be some kind of mechanism to couple / decouple the 2 quill gears and that is hidden by the stepped pulley itself. That is not functioning at present, as when I engage the reducer the entire thing locks up after about half a turn of the chuck. There seems to be something loose hidden inside the pulley as well... I was wondering whether there could be some kind of centrifugal clutch in there, that is what sprang to my mind but on the other hand that seems OTT for such a drill and I probably got this completely wrong.
Before I dismantle part of the head to try and understand how it works (and I believe that requires extracting at least one bearing) would anyone have any information about those Kerry drills please ? It would appear that quite a bit is known about drills from Progress, Fobco, Meddings, Ajax, Startrite, etc... but not Kerry (I only found some info about their lathes). I'd also be interested about the company (when did they operate, etc...), or any information that would help me date my drill. For instance, I found a picture of a 1948 ad for Kerry that shows the model of the drill I have (albeit the benchtop version). But then in those days such designs probably did not need to change for years and the moulds could have been used up to the Seventies, couldn't they ? I could not find a date on the drill, it just has a number on the casting: "650".
Many thanks,
Guillaume
