Project #3, Clausing 2276 drill repair, and mobile base, d.fisher

I must admit that I have dreamed of owning a Clausing drill press for some time now. Luckily, I recently purchased a broken Clausing drill press (model 2276) on e--bay. It had multiple problems, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with some parts from the factory. The table raising gearbox was full of bits and pieces of a shredded worm gear. Also, the variable speed drive was way out of sync with the speed rating on the dial. With about ten hours of general cleaning, greasing, and rebuilding, the press was operational again. The drill has a 2 speed, 3 phase motor, so I went through a crash course on 3-phase converters and had this thing humming like new. It's a rather heavy press, so to move it around my shop I needed a mobile base. Here's a pic of the drill when I first brought it home, and a custom sized, low profile mobile base. Since these pics were taken, I have added vibration absorbing leveling mounts. The casters look undersized, but I added three on each side with a 175lb rating for each. It travels nice and smooth, and when locked down, sits solid.
Don't worry, the anvil in the third photo is removed from its mobile base before put in use! I'll get some more detailed shots tomorrow of the leveling mounts.

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Here's a few photos of the finished drill base, with a detail of the phase converter mount. I only own one machine that needs the converter at the moment, so it was best to just keep it close by.
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thats one heck of a drill press, nice base you built!

Here's some pictures of the base as it was being built. I was lucky to find some free steel on craigslist. Some guy had finished his fire escape and had about 20 feet of this angle that he wanted gone. It's a nice size, 3.5" x 5" legs, and its 5/16" thick. I based the dimensions off of the drill press base, leaving about an inch or so in between for wiggle room.

Here's the pieces cut to size
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And here they are lightly hit with a wire cup brush to remove the excess rust and loose paint. This steel had that thick primer coat, which I don't dare remove all of, it's such a pain.
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The design calls for casters at the front and rear. So I just flipped the angle to create that nice overhang for mounting purposes. Its a real easy clamping situation. One on each side! After the pieces were matched up, I scribed chalk lines to indicate where I am welding and what part should be ground down to remove the paint and rust. Like I said before, I didn't want to strip the whole frame of the primer. I like to use that hammered finish from Rust.O.Leum. It can take some minor rust and surface imperfections nicely

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After all was ground down and pretty. I put the pieces back together and tacked them at each corner. In this case, I just connected each tack with one long bead. Its nice to throw down some weld like this. Most times my work only calls for small welds here and there.

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To finish the last part of the weld, I like to, if I can, flip the piece so that I am welding horizontally. My vertical welds leave something to be desired....

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For the "wings" that the leveling foot will screw in to, I just cut down the long leg of the same material so it would fit in nicely. I used a 3/4" spacer to align everything and clamped, tacked and welded. All of the final assembly was just locating and drilling and tapping the threads for the leveling feet and casters.


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