Quill Disassembly: Craftsman King-Seeley 103.23141 Drill Press Restoration, Pt. 13

In our last installment, we got the quill out of the drill press, and also got the top spindle and bearings out.

You may be wondering, are there any other projects happening in The Dungeon? Well, yes, I cleaned up a vintage Weymann tenor banjo - put a new head and tuners on it. I also set up a very cool Martin Signature Series prototype guitar. I'll write about them soon, but first let's get this quill apart.

This might be the easiest part of the disassembly. On the top of the quill, there is a collar which is held on with an allen screw. Comes off easily.

The shaft is splined at one end - that's the top end where it goes into the drive pulley. The other end is tapered, and it's the bottom end that the chuck goes on.

Inside the quill are two bearings - one at the top and one at the bottom. Those are the bearings we'll be replacing.

With the collar removed from the top of the quill, we can tap the shaft to free it from the quill.

Once again, I'm using my trusty rubber mallet.

Here's the mostly-apart quill.

The top bearing is still in the quill. And you can see the chuck collar and bottom bearing still on the shaft.

The top bearing taps out easily - I didn't even take a picture of that - it's simple to remove.

But the other bearing...ugh.

In order to get the bearing off, I needed to remove the bottom collar. It's held on with a dowel pin. A pin goes through a hole in the collar, then through a hole in the shaft, and finally into a blind hole on the other side of the collar.

It can't be tapped out, since the hole doesn't go all the way through. I posted on an online forum about this and got some ideas, but none of them really panned out. I was trying not to drill the thing out. While I did make a shallow hole in the pin (read on) as you see here, I didn't want to drill the whole (ha) thing. I was concerned about damaging the collar.

The end of the pin sits flush with the collar. It can't be grabbed onto at all.  So I drilled a small pilot hole as you see above. I figured I'd just get a new pin since this one would get destroyed (ha, that's an understatement).

Remember in the last post I said I had a sort of issue and a mess up? Well this is it. This held me up for days as I pondered what to do.

I soaked the pin with PB Blaster, put a drill bit in the hole, and tried to use the bit to pull the pin out. Ha. Dumb idea. The bit just popped out.

One of the suggestions was to "freeze" the pin with a freeze spray, thus having the pin contract a bit and make it easier to get out. This seemed like a good idea, but the area of the pin was so small it was difficult to just get the spray on the pin and not the collar.

I still needed something to grab onto the pin with. I came up with the idea of using a screw extractor (aka Easy-Out).

So I had been using the penetrating oil, tried shooting the freeze spray on it, and....

...still it wouldn't budge. I put vise-grips on the end of the extractor, tried turning, pulling...nothing.

I was trying not to damage the collar or the shaft, which are both made of that rare element, unobtanium. That's why I spent so much (wasted as it turned out) time trying to pull the pin out without drilling. But at this point I had no choice.

After making sure I could get a new pin to replace the original, I bit the bullet and just drilled the stupid thing out.

And even that took some time. The pin must be made of some super strong material, at least stainless steel.

Here it is. Yeah, that's right, gotcha!

You can see I got about halfway and it disintegrated.

Win one for me.

Maybe I should have soaked the whole end of the spindle in penetrating oil for a week and it would have come out? I don't know.

Sigh.

The upside is I got it apart. Once the pin was out, the collar slid right off.

Here's the collar removed from the spindle shaft. In drilling the pin out, I did drill into the outside of the pin's hole, but that part that I made a bit oval-shaped isn't that deep. The inner side, the hole through the spindle, and the "exit" side (you can see it in the picture) are all ok. So a new pin should fit perfectly.

Two things here: with the collar off, you can clearly see the Jacobs taper on the end of the shaft. And note the bearing is still on - I'll press that off with a press.

The collar had to come off, because the bearing needs to come off this end of the spindle - it can't go off the other direction.

Next time, I'll get the bearing off, clean some rust off the head, and start to reassemble. Whew.

The complete restoration saga

Part 1 - Beginning

Part 2 - Electrolysis to Remove Rust

Part 3 - Grinding to Remove Rust

Part 4 - Leveling Base Table

Part 5 - Recreating Model Number Label

Part 6 - Refinishing Base

Part 7 - Removing Motor

Part 8 - Motor Disassembly

Part 9 - Motor Bearing Replacement

Part 10 - Start Capacitor and Motor Reassembly

Part 11 - Removing Threaded Jacobs Chuck

Part 12 - Spindle Removal

Part 13 - Quill Disassembly

Part 14 - New Quill and Spindle Bearings

Part 15 - Engine Turned Aluminum Trim Proof of Concept

Part 16 - Engine Turned Aluminum Trim

Part 17 - Cleaning and Polishing Hardware

Part 18 - Jacobs 633C Drill Chuck Restoration

Part 19 - Cleaning and Polishing Column

Part 20 - Reassembly Begins

Part 21 - Restoration Completed