Sliding down the Slippery Slope

People who get into restoring old woodworking machinery tend to find it addictive - a slippery slope from which some never recover. Don’t know if this will happen to me, but there are worse addictions…

Somewhere I saw a picture of a vintage 8” Delta Jointer with a cast-iron base. The unit dated to somewhere between the late 40’s and mid-50’s, an era when there was still an artistic flair in industrial design. This particular piece of machinery had a Frank Lloyd Wright or Art Deco styling to it, and it was love at first sight. I little suspected that I’d find a very good deal on one of these jointers, and that this would be my first restoration project.

The phrase “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” applies to woodworking machinery. Many of the current crop of Chiwanese manufactured machines from Delta, Grizzly, Steel City, Jet, Powermatic, Rikon etc. are first-rate. I know many woodworkers that have this kind of equipment (including myself) who are very happy with their purchases. However, there is little doubt that in many ways vintage-era machines have certain things in their favor.

First, machined castings such as saw tables and jointer and planer beds were either allowed to cure for a much longer period of time before machining (they shrink and warp much like wood does as it dries), or were stress-relieved by a process very similar to annealing. This made these castings extremely stable so that it is rare to find one of these old machines with serious deformities in the machined surfaces. The iron reportedly was also of a much higher quality.

Second, older machinery had no qualms about using much more cast iron than modern machinery. Cast Iron is expensive to produce requiring highly skilled tradesmen, and has been replaced by sheet metal in many modern machines. This joiner in contrast has almost no sheet metal. The entire base, the motor mounting plate and all of the fence mounting pieces are made of cast iron. Only the stamped pieces that are used to hold the base panels together are sheet steel stampings. This makes the machines much heavier which helps to damp vibrations making them more stable and more accurate than some of the modern machinery. This unit in total weighs about 550 lbs.

Restoring one of these old machines is a lot of work. Even though this particular machine was in fairly good shape and there were only some fasteners and some other small parts that were either missing or damaged, the restoration took me three months.

Here is how the machine looked when I picked it up from the seller, another member of SEMIWW:

Here is one of the missing/damaged assemblies. The switch box was a bit bent-up, the original switch was MIA, and the switch plate (as you can see) was pretty chewed up.

This shot of the fence and fence adjustment mechanism shows another missing piece - the fence angle indicator - which I have yet to find or reproduce.

There were two nasty cosmetic damage areas. The first was this pork chop. I’d love to know what the heck happened here. Don’t you hate to see good tools abused?

The other damage was some chipping on the infeed and outfeed tables next to the cutterhead which you can see on the last of the pictures below

So, after a lot of paint and rust removal, bearing replacement, fastener and other part replacement and painting, here is the result:

One surprise was the difference between the same paint sprayed as you can see on the front and sides of the base, and the other pieces (including the “belly” motor cover) that were brushed. Brushing came out much glossier as you can see.

Here’s a closeup of the base. I couldn’t find any 5/16-18 stainless steel acorn nuts (every store’s sizes jumped from 1/4-20 to 3/8-16), so I used some brass ones I found to secure the motor cover. Note the stainless-steel oval-head horizontal-slot screws in the base.

The “pork chop” as you can see in the next picture came out pretty good. I used catalyzed automotive spot putty to fill the gouges, then sanded, primed and painted. The color isn’t appropriate to this model. Delta began using a red-painted pork chop on the next model (the 37-301A?), and I think original for this model was either gray or plain aluminum. Hard to tell from the pictures and drawings in the old brochures and manuals from that era.

Another shot of the jointer surfaces. These were almost completely free of rust, needing only some polishing with 220-grit wet-or-dry sandpaper lubricated with some mineral spirits.

This is a shot of the fence adjustment mechanism. Later models did not have this nice worm-drive adjustment, opting instead for a simple lever with a plastic ball on the end to change the angle of the fence, and a stop mechanism of some kind to set the fence at specified angles. The knobs were zinc, and I think may have been chromed at one time. After dithering about what to do with them, I opted to polish them and paint them red to match the pork chop. Again, not original, but I think it looks nice. Note the stainless-steel socket-head screws securing the fence and the fence adjustment locking lever. In case you hadn’t noticed, I love stainless steel fasteners.

The rear view. I got the reproduction knurled nuts from Mar Machinery to replace the originals that were missing. Again, this panel was rattle-can sprayed and didn’t cover as well or come out as glossy as the stuff I brushed.

I didn’t do anything to the dual-voltage 1 HP Repulsion-Induction motor, other clean it a bit and repair some of the leads whose cloth insulation was crumbling off. I used heat-shrink tubing for this, and it seemed to work well. This motor is probably pushing 60 years old, so I’ll probably have to get it rebuilt some day. Again, I replaced almost ALL of the fasteners with stainless steel, including the studs for the rear panel and the studs supporting the motor mounting plate. Actually, these “studs” are full-threaded stainless steel bolts that I secured to the brackets using JB Weld. You can also see the dust collection chute and the dust port that I bolted to the base.

The original handwheels were chrome-plated zinc, and were in pretty bad shape. These replacements that I bought from Grizzly closely approximate the hand wheels on the next 8” jointer model that Delta introduced. I wanted to paint the spokes gray to match the rest of the machine, but had no way to easily remove the chrome, so I left them as-is. They were also had a 1/2” bore, and my friend Clay Kessler kindly bored them to the needed 5/8” diameter on a bridgport mill at the machine shop where he works. Many thanks to Clay and Walnut_Charlie of SEMIWW and denizen of the OWWM forum for pointing out that I was courting disaster to try to bore these cast-iron wheels on my own drill press (even at the slowest speed, the bit would have chattered causing the bores to be oversize). You can also see the reproduction switch box I bought, as well as the brand-new OEM switch and the reproduction switch plate I made from a piece of aluminum, a vector drawing, some do-it-yourself decal sheets and an inkjet printer.

The last shot shows the chipping on the infeed and outfield tables, I was going to repair the infeed table, but couldn’t find anyone who had the capacity to mill a step in the edge into which I intended to silver-solder a strip of steel. It’s really pretty minor and won’t affect the operation - it’s just ugly.

This project was as satisfying and much fun as I’d hoped. It just turned out to be a LOT more work! I might do this again, but I learned that it’s a lot messier than woodworking, and best to do a lot of the operations outside during warm weather.

Maybe I’ll find me a good deal on a Delta Unisaw.