cincinnati-bickford radial arm drill

Hi YA'll,
An old Cincinnati-bickford found it's way into my shop today.. If anyone could point me in the direction of an owners manual I'd be much obliged.. I've oiled it up some using vactra no# 2 way oil on the assumption that any oil is better than no oil.. Any pointers on the right type of lube would be most useful..
Thanks in Advance,
Calvin

Eerily similar to this...

http://home.att.net/~micallahan/fosdick.html

Mike C,
Hmmm Maybe I should post this over in the antique section... The fosdick is close but.. not. Mine is the only one I have ever seen with a hollow arm. ( admittedly I haven't seen all that many) Plus mine is in alot better shape. Here's a pic of the controls and the table..
Thanks for post that though..
Stay safe
Calvin

I like that swiveling / pivoting table. That's pretty slick!

Calvin,

I believe I have what you need. I sent a PM / email.

Peter

Definitely not identical, but there are some castings that are identical, like the bevel gear banjo for the arm driveshaft and the bracket on the outboard end. Seeing teh side view, this looks even more like the Dreses radial I had at the museum. Had the hollow arm with holes on the back and everything, even the wheel on the column side.

Yeah, that one does look a lot cleaner than mine, but the old Fosdick is actually in real good condition, other than where those City idiots tipped it.

This is my 1913 Dreses:



It's to be expected that Fosdick, Dreses, and Cincinnati-Bickford would have some similarities, as they were all making radial drills in the same city at the same time.
Andy

Agreed Andy, additionally, all three companies were probably started by Billy Lodge, very likely making an indentical press at one time, which later morphed into the individual models.

Mike,
The three companies were not started by William Lodge, though in Cincinnati it was hard to be in the machine tool business without having some degree of involvement with him or his companies.
The Fosdick & Plucker Machine Tool Co. started building upright drills for Lodge, Davis & Co. about 1887. Several other Cincinnati makers (including LeBlond) got their start this way. At some point, the company was reorganized as the Fosdick & Holloway Machine Tool Co. Holloway left, due to ill health, in 1902, and the company reorganized as the Fosdick Machine Tool Co.
Dreses, Mueller, & Co. was formed in 1895 by Henry Dreses, Oscar Mueller, William Gilbert, and Charles Lange. Dreses and Mueller had both previously worked for Lodge, Davis & Co., Dreses as an engineer. Mueller sold out in 1902, and the company was reorganized as the Dreses Machine Tool Co. It lasted until 1939.
Henry Bickford (a native of New Hampshire) had worked as a mechanic for J. A. Fay & Co. before he started building drilling machines under his own name in 1874 (beating out Lodge, Davis & Co. by a few years). The Bickford Drill Co. was organized in 1887, then reorganized in 1893 and renamed the Bickford Drill & Tool Co. In 1894 the company absorbed the Universal Radial Drill Co. Cincinnati-Bickford was formed in 1909, when the Cincinnati Machine Tool Co. took over the Bickford Drill & Tool Co.
Here are a few ads from old Machinery magazines, all from around the turn of the century:







Andy

Andy Sir,
Thank you! Well, well it seem me drill press is a bit older than I thought. I was thinking somewhere in the 40's or maybe 30's.. but it appears to have a bit of age to it.. I can really see the 'bickford' lineage in it.. Any idea as to how old it may be ? I do believe it was a line shaft machine that was converted.. Take a look at the pics.. The motor has u.s.n.x 6425 painted on it and it's a lima 3 hp.
Thanks for ya'lls interest.
Stay safe
Calvin

Calvin,
The Lima is definitely a later addition. The plate it's bolted to looks like it has a footprint for something much larger to go there. The plate may have been added as well. Considering the era, the drill could have been either motor or line shaft driven.
If you look at the picture of my drill, you can see the transmission that is at the base of the column. A lot of drills from this era were equipped with this style gearbox- it is similar to a lathe quick change in design. Yours may have had one of those originally.
I don't know who owns Cincinnati-Bickford these days, but if you can find a serial number on the drill they may be able to tell you the year of manufacture.
Andy

Probably serial number location, see photo markup

LOL, Good piece Andy. Just as I figured.. this is like the L&S, American, Sidney thing...

http://www.americanprecision.org/option,com_easygallery/act,photos/cid,90/Itemid,78/

All these guys, as I suspected, had contact with Lodge. Lodge didn't actually "start" the companies to suppy L&D, but certainly had a hand in the formation. Fosdick definitely was a Lodge offspring. Dreses was an engineer for L&D, lol. Pretty to the point there. If Bickford was building drills in 1874, you can bet he was also supplying L&D... could be that HIS was the pattern all others were molded after. I notice his column-attached tilting table in the last pic.... same one that is on my Fosdick, complete with the outboard support.

Calvin, your machine, like mine and Andy's, was definitely descended from a line shaft. Mine appears to have been factory ordered with an electric conversion, but there was a depression to clear a big cone pulley under the transmission. Your machine may have been ordered to run on a lineshaft, or with a big DC motor for vari speed, or maybe the original transmission burned up, etc... Another sign of how old your machine is... lack of a multi speed head. Yours, like Andy's Dreses, depends soley on input speed for spindle speed control. I know there was a speed chart on the museum Dreses, and I'm pretty sure Andy's also has it. It listed recommended speed for various drilling, with the caveat "Double Speeds for High Speed Steel." You can deduce from this that the machines were made before HSS was common.

Half the fun of owning these old things is finding out who made them, and often finding they are a LOT older than you think. I figured my L&S lathe was a 1930's-40's model.... nope, 1918. Same for my Fosdick. I figured it was a 40's, but the first two numbers of the motor serial are 27... likely 1927 or 1928.

Andy, Peter and Mike,
Thank you all for your time and effort..
Peter, I looked on the arm and found the number sequence.. 3A4018 I'm not sure if that has any meaning or not.
I agree that it more than likely started life as a line shaft critter.. The motor and tranny really have the appearance of a lash up. I'm just going to wire her up and use her to make big holes in hard stuff.. I just could not bear seeing this machine go to the scrap heap.. especially after seeing it under power.. Why companies throw serviceable stuff out that they have a need and use for is beyond me..( in a couple of months they will probably be looking to buy it back from me ) I just wish they had made up their mind a little faster as the old girl sat out side for most of this very wet spring. But it seems to not have suffered much harm. The long years of being in a oil filled environment were to my benefit.
I can't get over how much this machine bears resemblance to the other manufacturers machines.. Just take a look at the base casting. It seems to be standard equipment on every bodies machine.. must of been a bulk buy at the foundry of something..
Thanks again,
Calvin

Mike C. said:

LOL, Good piece Andy. Just as I figured.. this is like the L&S, American, Sidney thing...

http://www.americanprecision.org/option,com_easygallery/act,photos/cid,90/Itemid,78/

All these guys, as I suspected, had contact with Lodge. Lodge didn't actually "start" the companies to suppy L&D, but certainly had a hand in the formation. Fosdick definitely was a Lodge offspring. Dreses was an engineer for L&D, lol. Pretty to the point there. If Bickford was building drills in 1874, you can bet he was also supplying L&D... could be that HIS was the pattern all others were molded after. I notice his column-attached tilting table in the last pic.... same one that is on my Fosdick, complete with the outboard support.

Click to expand...

Mike, if by "the pattern all others were modeled after" you mean the round, rotating column pattern, that design came from G. A. Gray. His Universal Radial Drill Co. was the first in Cincinnati (around 1880) to make round-column radial drills (Gray left Universal in 1883 and started the G. A. Gray Co.). Bickford Drill & Tool bought out the Universal Radial Drill Co. in 1894.
As I said previously, it was pretty hard to manufacturer machines in Cincinnati without having some form of contact with William Lodge. While there certainly was some discourse between the various Cincinnati drilling machine manufacturers, there was far to much variation in the earlier designs of the companies in question (Dreses, Fosdick, and Bickford) to suppose that all three modeled their machines on one design. In 1899, Dreses, Mueller & Co. were making radial drills that used flat ways for the vertical movement (see attached ad), and the 1902 Fosdick & Holloway advertisement that I posted above shows a drill with the same design. Fosdick's drill had a fixed column, using a hinge on the arm for radial movement, while the Dreses drill had a column that rotated at the base. The column-attached table was an option on many manufacturer's drills. I have seen it on Universal, Bickford, Fosdick, Wm. Gang, Dreses, and other machines from Cincinnati, as well as on machines from outside that area.
Where did you get the information on Bickford having supplied machines to Lodge & Davis? I've never found a reference to that, and would be interested to know where you read it. By the way, I should have been more clear regarding Bickford's drill manufacture: he did not begin building radial drills until 1887. Prior to that year, he built upright drills.
Here's an interesting article on radial drill design in 1899 from Machinery:http://books.google.com/books?id=5jMAAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA307&dq=universal+radial+drill+co.&client=firefox-a#PPA307,M1.

calvin b,

Nice drill. My Niles and American Tool Works radials have hollow arms.

Andy has given some very good info.
Dreses Machine Tool is still in business. The name was changed to Cincinnati Gilbert. They now make HBM's.

The first round rotating column radial drill with the arm that went up and down on the round column was patented by George Gray in 1869 and was made by Niles Tool Works(Gray was part owner). Gray left Niles around 1877 and started Universal Radial Drill Co. Pat. link.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=9gxOAAAAEBAJ&pg=PP1&dq=97,908&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=0_1

H. Bickford never sold drills to Lodge that I know of.

Rob

Rob, I did not know Gray designed the Niles radial drill. Thanks for that information. J. W. Roe's English & American Tool Builders is where I got the information on Universal being the first to build a round-column drill. I guess the drills Gray had previously designed for Niles must have slipped Roe's mind.
My Dreses drill also has a hollow arm.

Andy

Actually, I was referring more to the head than the column design. I have seen the flat way machines and also the "door hinge" swing setup. I have also seen an ad on Ebay for a flat slide Fosdick with the rotating column like the Dreses.

The heads are very similar, though. One thing they all seem to share in common is the pick up gear system on the powerfeed, kind of a spring-loaded key that locks up a drive gear out of the stack on the cone. The Dreses, the Fosdick and the Bickford all use that exact same feed setup. The only real differences in the heads seems to be the placement of the travel handle, Fosdick to the outboard end and the other inboard. Same method of engaging feed, hard to see how the stop is set up, but probably very similar there, too. Maybe it's like a lathe, where there is only one good way to do something, but they sure are a lot alike.

On that column mounted table, I am not saying others didn't have them, but look at the table in the first set of ads you posted and then look at the base and table of my Fosdick. Very nearly identical, all the way down to the shape of the support leg and the table design itself.


Have not read anywhere that Bickford was selling to L&D, but it seems they were subbing out to nearly everybody else, so I would expect that having a drill maker close by, they would take advantage of the situation... unless they formed Fosdick instead of dealing with Bickford.

Just got to thinking... Andy, your press is a three speed head, right? It's been a few years since I put that identical Dreses at the museum back together. Seems the lever to the left of the head was a three speed, backgear in lowest, a mid range and a high range, other speed controlled by the input.

I see Calvin's has two levers hanging down from the head... how many speeds do those levers get you?

The Fosdick is a four speed head, two-two position levers. Input speed was varied for any other speeds.


"The Bickford Drill Co. was organized in 1887, then reorganized in 1893 and renamed the Bickford Drill & Tool Co. In 1894 the company absorbed the Universal Radial Drill Co."

"Gray left Niles around 1877 and started Universal Radial Drill Co."

Hmmmm.

BTW, Giddings & Lewis owns Bickford. The radial I run at work is a 1965 G&L Bickford, apparently originally sold to Pontiac.

My drill has a three-speed head.
The three maker's drills are similar, yes; as I mentioned earlier, that's to be expected from three makers of the same product operating out of the same city. The stacked-gear feed system is a common design, used on both radial and upright drills from various makers located in and out of Cincinnati.
The Fosdick and Bickford tables are similar, but they are not the same. They are not close enough to think that there was any sort of particular connection.
Yes, as was mentioned in previous posts, G. A. Gray started the Universal Radial Drill Co, which was then absorbed by Bickford Drill & Tool Co. Gray is credited with having designed and built the first round-column radial drills in the Cincinnati area, while at Niles Tool Works in Hamilton. According to J. W. Roe's book, Gray made a trip through the eastern states after the war to "familiarize himself with machine tool building", and when he returned to Hamilton the company focused on building machine tools (they had previously only built tools occasionally for their own use).
Calvin, you should call G&L with your serial number- they may be able to give you some information on your drill. Cincinnati-Gilbert had a little bit on mine, so it's worth a try. Their number is 920-921-9400.
Andy

That would be the model 3A radial drill serial number 4017

I found some serial number/year data for that time period in an older copy of the Serial Number Book. A cherished photocopy. Relevant page attached. Might be worth a download for Bickford owners.

Here shows 3611 was made in 1919
and 4320 was built in 1927.

Since that is all I have to to go by, then I will assume 88 machines built per year in that time period. Based on 709 machines during the 8 year interval. The number 4018 is 407 machines after 1919 which makes an approximation of 1924.

3A4017 built in 1924 (more or less)

I don't see any evident to say this was more likely a flat belt drive than an electric drive. It might be likely to have had a variable speed motor mounted on the base. Some had a simple step cone pulley for a flat belt -but the base is different on those. Some had a gear box with a (right angle drive) flat belt drive of the side - another possibility. 50/50 at this point.

I attached two images of what I consider the most likely original drive setup based on hole patterns I see on the photos above. Edit: I take this back, looked at photos again, there is an extra plate on the base - I simply dont know. Posted here here are two of 4 drives options shown in 1921.