Machinist's Minutes: Reassembling a churn drill main shaft (part 2/2)

Have you ever wondered how to put the main shaft of a churn drill back together after you took it apart 30 years ago? Wonder no more! This applies to churn drills made from the early 20th century all the way to the 80's - the design didn't change much at all.

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Ilove this guys videos. He talks like my 88 yr old machinist who would just shake his head at what I wanted to do but would eventually come up with a way to do it. Our first product was a state of the art Wavelength Dispersive X-ray Spectrometer. My optics had surface roughness measured in tenths of nanometers. The precision of the parts were in a tenth of a thousand of an inch. All we had were a mill and a lathe made in the 1940s. He was able to do it because he knew how to accomodate the innacuracies in the old machines. When the customer came to see the spectrometer work, he was shocked at the old machines the machinist was using. We then bought new machines but he resisted buying CNC but he eventually relented to allowing huge blocks of Al to be hogged out via CNC. I told him that it was worth paying him to make 5 of something on manual machines but if it was more than 10 it would be CNC. On many parts, he was still more productive than CNC. He told me that 90% of a job was doing the fixturing that allowed him to make stuff and it was fascinating to see the little fixtures that allowed him to achieve crazy levels of accuracy. We had fun but I finally ran out of ideas and he retired. He never did train anybody in the stuff he knew how to do and now its all lost.