The ’REGULATEUR’ - Vintage Centrifugal Drill Press Restoration

This time I am restoring an old bench drill. It was built from about 1905. The special feature is the centrifugal weights that automatically regulate the contact pressure. When the machine came on the market, this must have been a very big relief. At last, you no longer had to crank with one hand and regulate feed with the other; you had one hand free to control the workpiece. Restoration was quite a challenge. At first it looked like there was just some rust and patina. But then it became apparent that someone had thrown the whole machine into an electrolysis bath of copper. There was a layer of copper almost a millimeter thick everywhere. While there was no longer any rust, the copper had crawled everywhere and baked everything tightly together. So I couldn’t salvage the drill chuck either and had to replace it with another antique drill chuck. Many parts had to be remade. A lot of work for my little lathe! I tried to keep everything as true to the original as possible. But I allowed m