My shop was flooded 5 feet deep in a previous location 26 years ago. This set of excess drills cabinets was mounted on the wall behind my lathe at the 4’-8” level, so a couple of lower rows of drawers took on water. After refreshing a few Huot indexes of drills for use and cleaning the lower rows of drills before rusting, the rest stayed as they were and got wrapped with stretch wrap for shop relocation. Fast forward 10 years.
In 2010 I finally got my present home shop up and going, so since then has been setting up and using the shop, refurbishing and refreshing the flooded machinery and tools, and enjoying retirement. A new refurbishment hobby arose from all that. Since I had drills to use, the extra drills in the cabinet had not been a priority. I recently decided to tackle that nine armed spider monkey, so laid all the drills out on a large table, washed all the plastic drawers with Awesome cleaner and Dawn Powerwash, and got at it.
The cabinets were mounted on the wall above my present lathe, all drills measured and sorted, and labels applied. This relatively small project was the last of the flood effects left visible in my shop, and it was a really mentally refreshing closure to get that done. I hand wrote the labels to match what I had done in 1999, so it all looks exactly like it did then. The beauty of this system is that when at the lathe you can reach over and select a drill without moving away and leave the drawer slightly open as an indicator until the drill goes back in the proper drawer. The several sets of Huot indexers are kept on the tooling cabinet next to the Bridgeport mill.
See my mantra in my avatar.
Concur, though. I was intrigued with the choice of material and, while adopting the basic elements of the classic rotary index, not the same mechanism.
The 17/32 punch is now homeless though.
The company was about 30 minutes south of me.
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