A day with the drill press

Alternately, a day of project creep.

I’ve been trying to figure out a tongue box (my wife loves that term, BTW) for the utility trailer. A place to store the lines, straps, wheel chocks, locks, tarps, tools, and other sundries that the trailer requires. But they’re fairly expensive and I’m having problems finding one that seems to be the right size size.

Remember the drill press? It’s a post about the drill press (mostly).

But then I saw it, on a neglected shelf in the garage. A Rubbermaid Action Packer box. Before we met, my wife used it to store her camping kitchen equipment. It sat empty at the old house for years. When we moved here I filled it with the candle lanterns that we use for party lights. Of course we moved just before the pandemic started and haven’t had any parties.

I know that the KLR crowd uses small action packers as tail boxes, so I think it is reasonably water tight. It’s lockable, certainly large enough for my needs, and the price is definitely within my budget. It might not be perfect (foreshadowing), but it will do.

Now I have to empty it.

Eleven metal and glass lanterns. Where can I safely store eleven bits of glass and metal? In the old house, I hung them from the ceiling rafters in the garage. That won’t do here, as the ceiling is sheet rocked, and far too high to reach. But there is an unused bit of wall above the chest freezer. Some quick measuring and mathing confirms that there is enough space. Now to design and build the solution.

And all the lumber was already in my garage.

It’s basically a coat rack. 1×6 and wooden dowels. As compact as I could reasonably make it, as you can see.

PROBLEM 1 – I need all the dowel holes lined up perfectly. Any variation will be immediately obvious. All I need is a fence on the drill press table that I can register the board against and my holes will be the same distance from the edge of the board.

PROBLEM 2 – the drill press table tilts left to right. I need it to tilt front to back. All I need is a spacer to hold one edge of the board up.

The “proper” way to do this would be to get or make four hold-downs and either build a table with T-track or mortise some slots in my fences so I could attach them to the existing iron table. And I might go back and do this someday, but today isn’t that day.

Clamps sort of work, but the bottom of the table has webs that interfere, the plywood creates a flat bottom.
No idea at all what angle it is, but it’s the same angle for all twelve holes

If you noticed the rollers on either side of the drill press, they came out of a house fire clean out years ago. I intended to build feed rollers for the table saw, but never spent any time figuring out how. I found them again and realized how they were supposed to be used.

Now that I’ve set the rollers up, I see that I can easily attach them to the saw horses with U-bolts. These extension rollers will be hugely helpful when we are making repair parts for the ger. Step one is to drill holes every 12 inches through a 2×4, then rip the 2×4 into 1/4” thick pieces of lathe. As you can imagine, balancing a 2×4 on the tiny drill press table is a challenge and keeping the ends of the board fully engaged on the table saw blade while you’re 6 feet away isn’t much easier.

And now we get the tongue box to the trailer.

Expletives deleted.

It’s not supposed to be like this!

This box is too small for my tongue.

This is better

And this is what I mean by job creep. This box should work. > Empty the box. > Design a lantern rack. > Make two fences for the drill press. > Build & install the rack. > Buy steel to modify the A-frame to support the box. (A project for another day.)

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Author: rexplex

With a bachelors degree in history, I turn wrenches for a living. I’m most at peace when I hear the wind in the trees or the gurgle of a brook. I’m a believer in the Renaissance Man, as epitomized by DaVinci engineer, artist, soldier, statesman. As Heinlein said, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

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