Help ID yet another old camelback drill?

A friend of mine has this drill in his shop:



It's dirty and could use a good oiling, but otherwise in very good shape and works well.



There are no marks or numbers that we could see. There's four small holes in the quill boss where a plate probably once was, but it's clearly been missing for the last three or four paintjobs. There's a plate just below the crown gear for Perine Machinery out of Seattle, but a previous shaper ID thread revealed that to be a dealer, not the manufacturer.

It has an electric motor (of course) but the mounts and whatnot are a later addition, not like the later-version camelbacks that had a motor boss cast in.

Can anyone give a positive ID and maybe a rough date?

Doc.

Can't help with the i.d., but that's the most exotic feed mechanism I've seen on one of these old drills. Possibly to circumvent a patent? A nice, stout drill for sure.

Supposedly it's last job, just recently, was to push that 3-1/2" holesaw through some 2" plate. They set it for the lowest speed, and put that silver tape on the downfeed pulley so the belt would "slip" a bit. Enough to keep the pressure on the saw, but not enough to break or jam anything.

And they'd just wander by every few minutes as they were working on other things, and give it a squirt of cutting oil. Apparently it took about an hour.

Doc.

Silver manufacturing used a feed drive very similar to the drill in your pics as well as other features. Could be what it is. OWWM photo index would be a good place to check that manufacturer out but if you sort by machine type it takes a long time to load. By company it is much faster. Ed.

I poked around in there a bit, Rock, but didn't see any obvious matches just yet. Still looking.

Anyone else have any idea who made this badboy? It's got lots of features that are close to my Rockford, but only "close" as in "probably inspired by".

Doc.

Yep, there it is. Just like you said, Rock, it's a Silver. The one on OWWM has a couple minor differences- like the table elevating handle- but that power downfeed is identical down to the cotter pin.

I wonder if there's a way we could help pin down when it was made...

Doc.

The pics of the three I just looked at on OWWM all list the date of manufacture in the 1910's and even though Silver was around earlier It looks like they started with post drills and such. There is a quite a lot of info for Silver manufacturing there though...a very interesting company. Eric LaVelle who post here sometimes has one, maybe he will chime in with a little more history or information. Ed.