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Sher brand minature drill press

SAG 180

Titanium
Joined
Sep 17, 2007
Location
Cairns, Qld, Australia
Was as the garbage dump recycling shop today and spotted this small Sher branded drill press with a rack and pinion drive cast iron table that moves up and down to drill the holes while the 10 000 RPM universal motor can slide up and down the post and be locked at a desirable height. It's a very heavy unit with solid steel post and cast iron base and fittings along with what looks to be an unpainted cast aluminium body that must have been polished rather than painted. After a bit of Googling I found a biography of William Peter Sher who was a Viennese electrical engineer who had worked in early European power tool manufacture before emigrating to Australia in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution: Biography - William Peter Sher - Australian Dictionary of Biography . Sher Power Tools Pty. Ltd. started making power tools in 1957 and in 1967 Skil Tool Company USA bought up all the shares, so this drill must have been made within that ten year interval.

The dump guy told me that it was out of a skip bin full of somebody’s basement instrument repair workshop and this was the only item out of all the small tools and hardware dumped in the landfill mud that was recovered.


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Hi SAG,your pics gave me a little chuckle. 50-odd years ago as an apprentice in a defence establishment I saw a steady flow of power tools in for repair, mainly drills, & mainly imports. Most had burned commutators or burned out armatures which we rewound. The Sher drills only ever needed new switches..& there is your Sher bench drill with a modern switch hanging off..
Still have a half inch, two speed Sher myself, was Dad's, torquey enough to be dangerous, not used for years owing to weight.
 
Hi SAG,your pics gave me a little chuckle. 50-odd years ago as an apprentice in a defence establishment I saw a steady flow of power tools in for repair, mainly drills, & mainly imports. Most had burned commutators or burned out armatures which we rewound. The Sher drills only ever needed new switches..& there is your Sher bench drill with a modern switch hanging off..
Still have a half inch, two speed Sher myself, was Dad's, torquey enough to be dangerous, not used for years owing to weight.

I see in Peter Sher's biography that he believed in making a long lasting tool and that He thought the import power tools were designed to wear out, I wonder what he would have made of modern power tools. I'd love to get the correct switch with it's four mounting holes but it would likely be old fragile bakelite.


That will look pretty cool all fixed up.......
The motor will need a be a bit of TLC and cleaning before I power it up, the bearings are dry but it spins freely. I'm planning on polishing the rust off the post and will manganese phosphate it....it'll need some kind of oil loving coating in this humid environment. as for the iron castings, they seem to have been black originally. So it would be all black except for the motor housing which will be bare polished aluminium.
 
Today I dismantled the drill after leaving it sit overnight with a few drops of Mouse Milk on all the fasteners and moving parts. Everything came apart surprisingly easy including the slide off the rusty post after a light sanding of the post rust. The motor wasn't too bad internally, a small amount of rust on the stator laminations that came off easy. The rotor windings were coated in a thick clear resin and looked like new, while the commutator and brushes were worn. I was able to get new brushes a little oversize and sand them to fit and skimmed the commutator with the Bantam lathe after centering on the front bearing journal and then on an unworn section of the commutator: the bearing journal at that end was a bit worse for wear: it looks like a bearing had spun and then whoever replaced it prick punched the journal to secure the bearing. I had to cut the bearing off with a grinder and crack the inner race to get it off.

The aluminium housing looks to be black sand cast and I did some basic fettling of the castings and then sanded some of the filing and grind marks with wet and dry before giving it a heavy buff. The buff just got the corrosion off and even though the end cap doesn't align too well with the main body, it does match the original photos I took. After a bit of careful assembly with the commutator bearing secured with some medium strength threadlocker, I had the whole assembly back together again. I connected a 100 W bulb in series with the motor and wired it up and applied power: it spun slowly with no fireworks, so I gave it the full 240V and it spun up nicely and wasn't as loud as I was expecting for 10 000 RPM. I ran it until the bearings warmed up and shut it down for the night.......the old girl still works fine.

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Today I dismantled the drill after leaving it sit overnight with a few drops of Mouse Milk on all the fasteners and moving parts. Everything came apart surprisingly easy including the slide off the rusty post after a light sanding of the post rust. The motor wasn't too bad internally, a small amount of rust on the stator laminations that came off easy. The rotor windings were coated in a thick clear resin and looked like new, while the commutator and brushes were worn. I was able to get new brushes a little oversize and sand them to fit and skimmed the commutator with the Bantam lathe after centering on the front bearing journal and then on an unworn section of the commutator: the bearing journal at that end was a bit worse for wear: it looks like a bearing had spun and then whoever replaced it prick punched the journal to secure the bearing. I had to cut the bearing off with a grinder and crack the inner race to get it off.

The aluminium housing looks to be black sand cast and I did some basic fettling of the castings and then sanded some of the filing and grind marks with wet and dry before giving it a heavy buff. The buff just got the corrosion off and even though the end cap doesn't align too well with the main body, it does match the original photos I took. After a bit of careful assembly with the commutator bearing secured with some medium strength threadlocker, I had the whole assembly back together again. I connected a 100 W bulb in series with the motor and wired it up and applied power: it spun slowly with no fireworks, so I gave it the full 240V and it spun up nicely and wasn't as loud as I was expecting for 10 000 RPM. I ran it until the bearings warmed up and shut it down for the night.......the old girl still works fine.

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Looks good, keep posting!
 
Here's the photos of the parts cleaned up and degreased before painting with hammertone grey. The iron castings had a few areas with the original black finish preserved under layers of fine brass dust and hard grease. The black looks like the old school iron finish of lamp black mixed with shellac which is the same as my 1960's vintage 21" Hercus camelback drill. The 1.5" steel post caused a bit of consternation as I thought it may have a blind stud or maybe a taper pin intersecting the post but it ultimately revealed itself to be an old bicycle style crank cotter pin. I would have saved half an hour if I noticed the motor to post mount casting had the same thing. Everything rusty had the rust sanded off in the lathe and a coat of grey acrylic hammertone paint before assembling to the current state. I still have to fabricate a switch panel out of thick aluminium with a groove down the bottom to match the casting to provide the power lead exit.




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Here's some photos of the finished project. I had to refit some metal shield bearings to the motor after the rubber seal bearings ran too hot at 13K RPM no load. The new lever is some 316 stainless rod with a drilled and tapped ball. The castings are fully painted and the post is now some 1.5 inch hard chrome steel bar salvaged off a broken hydraulic ram. The commutator segments were scraped to relieve the phenolic insulation after the segments were beginning to foul. Ebay UK provided a new old stock USA made Jacobs 1A chuck after I lost the original rusty older style knurled Jacobs chuck. The cable now exits from the top, I have no idea what the original set up looked like but the cable seems to foul less by exiting from the top of the cover milled from some frosty acrylic sheet I had lying around: thick phenolic would have been nicer but acrylic was on hand. Rubber feet are topped off with nickel finish acorn nuts. The final icing on the cake would be to balance the rotor with the chuck fitted and it's position carefully marked.

I'm very pleased with how it turned out, similar small drills for printed circuit boards or for drilling lenses in optometry work are around $2000 new. This little drill cost $100 or so complete plus some spare time and preserves a bit of Australian power tool history.

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Bravo ! beautiful, now, you just need to find some un-plated fillister or truss head slotted screws for the switch plate...


It was hard enough getting some 5/32" screws in this town: the screws holding the motor together are cheese head screws, so I guess some of those would be nice, but not so much that I'd make them by hand and then polish and blue them!. Thanks to everyone for the comments about the project too, it's not a hard core restoration, more of a pressing back into service after some repairs. I put it to work immediately drilling circuit boards and it did 200 holes in a matter of minutes. FR4 fibreglass board is hard on drills so I look forward to trying some small gauge carbide in this drill.
 
Found an interesting variation on this drill on Ebay Australia: a little 4 inch tool post grinder. As a bonus, I get to see what the power switch arrangement would look like.

LATHE TOOLPOST GRINDER 4INCH SHER | eBay

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