The DrillPress
Probably a blacksmith shop; probably Greenfield Village.
But I wouldn’t bet on it.
I’ve always been fascinated with machinery of … basically the late pre-electricity era. Steam-powered, hand-powered. Belt-driven, high-precision tooling. Some fascinating work came out of some of those shops. Didn’t even have computers.
Something has been lost – perhaps just the era – since everything has become so dependent on computers.
On the other hand, those old-timers couldn’t work in nanometers (a nanometer is incomprehensively small; if a nanometer was expanded as long as an inch, an inch would be 400 miles long. There is work done everyday at such scales.
Last summer a friend bought a 1940’s Craftsman floor standing drill press at an auction for $300. Similar to the (bench top) pik below. He stripped it down and redid everything from the ground up, spent another $200 in bearings, bolts and other things. Painted it in the original dark green color. He also put a 1″ chuck on it. Gorgeous. My father in law had a bench top version from the 40’s and when he passed I wanted to buy it but my asshole BIL sold it to someone else. That was 18 years ago and we still ain’t talking.
This is my Dillon RL550B reloading press. It is one notch up from the bottom of Dillon’s line and the “B” model has been replaced with the “C” (the primary difference between the two being that the C has a zerk for lubrication). Dillon says that the 550 will produce 500 pistol or rifle rounds per hour (I am lucky to reload at half that rate).
But the reason that I bring this up is the gunpowder that the press puts into each round. My recipe for my 9mm reloading uses 6.0 grains of a gunpowder known as AA7. Not 5.9 grains. Not 6.1 grains. 6.0 grains.
But what is a “grain”? A grain is 1/7000th of a pound. That mechanical press which is mounted on a bench in my often very warm garage, will drop (reliably enough for my purposes) powder at an accuracy of 1/70000th of a pound.
And yes, this really is my garage….I took this picture this morning. Every horizontal surface has a cosmic magnet attached underneath which attracts tools or parts from some project that I’ve sorta finished and sorta not or projects that I need to get to one day. Maybe I’ll get it cleaned up one day, but I wouldn’t count on it.
I’ve been drooling over the Dillon stuff since the 80’s. One of these days I hope to be as organized as you. lol
I bought my 550 back during the Clinton administration, if I remember right. Ammo had become expensive and unavailable and I decided that I wasn’t going to be so constrained.
Today’s reloaders often add auto case- and bullet-feeders, neither of which I have. I manually put each brass case and bullet into the machine. Each pull of the handle nets me a new round, which I then QC for overall weight and cartridge dimensions.
I went to the Dillon site earlier and blew an hour or so pricing their top of the line rig, then looking at a couple videos. I had to get out of there before I did something ‘spensive. lol
In the 90’s they used to send me their catalog, I think monthly, and it always had very appealing eye candy.