Cleaning and Polishing Hardware: Craftsman King-Seeley 103.23141 Drill Press Restoration, Pt. 17

Back at it on the King-Seeley restoration. I've had a pile of hardware bits stashed away awaiting the reassembly, which is approaching. I would say 'rapidly' approaching, but since this project has dragged on for months, 'rapid' is not the word.

Most of the parts have been cleaned up already. This means cleaning with Simple Green, or, in the case of parts that showed rust or corrosion, a soaking in rust remover solution.

This is a sampling of them on the bench before final cleaning and polishing.

The painted parts get polished and waxed with Griot's products.

Here's the table support. It had some light rust on it when I took it off. I de-rusted it and in the couple of months it's been sitting, it started to get light rust again.

So I cleaned it and put a thin coat of lithium grease on it. I would have lubricated it during reassembly, but right now the grease will protect the bare metal surfaces from corrosion.

I also sprayed the housing with Boeshield T-3.

This is the table lock handle. You can see the light corrosion I was referring to. Some parts showed this, and some didn't.

For these parts, I just take some Mother's Mag and Aluminum polish to them.

The same handle after polishing, along with the head stop lock handle and some other hardware. All ready to go.

There's always something on every project that you look forward to doing. In this case, it was the rods and knobs for the feed handle. That's the handle on the right side of the press that makes the quill, and therefore the chuck and a bit, go up or down.

You can see they're in good shape, but the rods have some corrosion and the knobs could use cleaning an polishing - they seem to have paint splatters on them.

I did a bit of an experiment with the rods. I'm not sure if they had been chromed originally, but if they had, the plating is gone.

So I set out to polish the metal to the highest shine I could manage.

The experiment was to try both steel wool and sandpaper and see which gave the better finish.

I chucked one of the rods in my small Delta press, and polished it with steel wool. Wear glove when you do this - the steel wool will throw little bits which can stick in your skin!

I used #1, #0, #000, and #0000 steel wool in turn.

Then I polished the rod with Mother's polish and a clean cloth.

It looked good - doing this by machine is the way to go.

Here's the steel wool-polished rod - at the bottom. Compare it to the two rods that haven't been polished yet.

Then I did another rod using sandpaper. Started with 220 grit and worked up to 12000 (!).

And then polished with the aluminum polish again.

The sandpaper-polished version is in the middle. It looks even better than the steel wool version...maybe not a surprise since I could go to a much finer grit than the steel wool.

Since that one was the winner, I did the other two with sandpaper. Started with 1500 grit on the steel-wooled one, and did the whole process on the untouched one.

Little effort, big results. What fun.

Now on to the knobs. I put them on a rod and then used plastic polish to clean them up.

Here are the finished rods, knobs, and the Novus polish I use.

I'm pretty sure the knobs are made of bakelite; they look classy. And with the polishing, they look nice - much better than modern plastic knobs.

Now that the hardware is cleaned and polished, the last piece to work on is the Jacobs 633C chuck. I'm going to disassemble it and see what condition the innards are in.

Stay tuned.

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