Atlas / Craftsman Drill Press Table Lift

*I've updated this thread with much more information and detail in post #4 after a member here asked me about it.*

A recent find......It was missing one of the original collar clamp handles and the miter gear that is supposed to be attached to the other side of the crank handle:

I did some figuring and determined what miter gear was needed to make it work. The gear already had the correct bore and was a perfect match for the other original gear....all I had to do was shorten it some to make it mesh with the other one:

With that and a corrected clamp handle, I was in business.....or so I thought. I put the thing together and it worked. I knew the one original gear was iffy.......I don't know if it was made out of some **** metal or if it had been severely abused in another life - but the one original gear I had was "crumbly", as if it was going to just fall apart. It was, however, enough to let me learn about these miter gears and pitch and faces, etc. In a few turns the old gear gave up and the teeth sheared off:

So I ordered a mate for my other gear. This one was an odd fit though. It wanted a 3/4" bore, keyed, and about a 2" overall height. That wasn't going to happen except on a custom order. So I received the second gear and decided I would push my limited machining abilities a bit further. I cut off the business end of the old miter gear and saved the lower sleeve which was already dimensioned and keyed to fit on the shaft. I took my new gear and widened the bore from 5/8" to 3/4", and shortened it accordingly:

I then welded the gear to the old sleeve and carefully smoothed it out so it would turn in the bore in the housing:

Fortunately, the miter gear assembly in this case is hand-cranked/low speed, so any imperfections in my gear mating really aren't an issue. Something tells me that if I ran my fabbed gear up to a few thousand rpms I'd fully recognize my need for some real milling and machining gear. The end product runs smoothly and functions as designed:

Excellent job!

Thanks for sharing your repair with us. Do you still have the lift? How has it held up over the last 6 years?

There is so little info on these it would be great if we could gather everything up and put it in one thread. Maybe when I get mine and have something to contribute I will start one up.

lafester said:

How has it held up over the last 6 years? There is so little info on these it would be great if we could gather everything up and put it in one thread.

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Apologies......I typically follow my build or repair threads to answer questions and stay updated. For some reason I wasn't following this one. To answer lafester's question: It's holding up and working great ten years later!.....What caused me to excavate this thread? I received a PM from one of our members asking me about the repair. When I went looking for it I realized I left out key info such as where I got the gears, etc.

I've updated the name of the thread and added some information that may help someone trying to make one of these table lifts work. It appears I just did the repair, put it into service, and did a lousy job of documenting it. I've attached some more pictures, added some links to what I think are the gears I used, and added some pictures of the original patent drawing that detail the insides of the unit. As we learned ten years ago, the gears were made of junk pot metal. It looks like I replaced one and then the other when it crumbled as well. I just opened mine up and there's two good looking 90 degree miter gears in there.

One gear mounted on the handle shaft, but I had to cut off most of the collar below the gear teeth to make it short enough to mount. The other gear inside the box mounts to a sleeve that slides over the top of the screw drive. I had to cut the lower collar off the second gear and weld it to the top of the original sleeve to get it to play with the hardware already in there.....It really came down to making sure the two gears mesh together.

I'm pretty sure these are the gears I used, based on what I said in the opening post about the I.D. and by counting the 18 teeth I can see in those old pictures.....Although looking at it now, you might be able to use a 3/4" ID gear inside the box and save yourself some work.....I've always used McMaster-Carr, so that's where I likely ordered them from (....nope, their account/order system doesn't seem to go that far back). Disclaimer: Check the measured drawings they have against your parts for fit. Yours might require more or less modification:


Photos of the inside of my unit:







The patent drawings showing the inner workings:





Photos of the patent label on the side of the unit and some numbers and letters on the top of it:

I am the member who PM'ed Jtbinvalrico regarding his gear replacement on the Atlas head and table lift. I was directed to him by (who else?) FrankLee.

I had met with a seller who had a garage full 1930s era custom roadsters and got to talking and ogling to the point where I all but forgot about checking out the drill press in advance. Either way, I still would have bought it because of the price, because of how clean the drill press was and the fact that it had an Atlas made Craftsman 7x7 cross slide sitting on it.

Here it is sitting in the back of my SUV and I am one happy camper with lift #5:



The moment I got it out and attempted to turn the handle on the lift, it spun freely while the main screw didn't move at all. This was an "uhoh" moment to say the least. I opened up the gearbox and:





The handle mounted gear was MIA and the other had disintegrated. The sleeve that Jtbinvalrico had welded the lower gear to was present though. Other than the gears, the lift is intact. Still surprises me that companies such as Atlas, Delta and Walker Turner would make machinery so heavy duty and robust and then use pot metal in such critical areas.

Thanks to FrankLee and Jtbinvalrico who did an outstanding job repairing his, I have a great head start on how to attempt the same repair. I'll share my results on this thread.

Cleaver design. I haven't seen that one before, thanks.

My 65 year old Delta drill press, that I inherited from dad, never had a table lift. We had to hold down the base with one foot to keep the drill press from rocking, then twist the table while pulling it up the column. Needless to say a GPITA. Eventually my dad installed a 3rd part accessory that employs a crank, sprockets and a bicycle type chain, about 50 years ago. Still works great to this day. Am currently restoring the drill press.

I've seen DIY table lifts on YouTube fabricated from trailer tongue jacks to boat winches.

In helping Hoorn with his rebuild I'm reminded of some other details that might help, as well as the question of what I.D. to get the gears in, 5/8" or 3/4"......(Disclaimer: Pull yours apart, measure, and double-check anything I suggest)

I went ahead and partially disassembled my unit because otherwise my bad memory is going to cause me to provide inaccurate information.....First: Measuring the ID on the handle gear shows 5/8", and then it looks like I drilled a hole through the bit of remaining collar to run a pin through to secure it.......Second: The screw drive shaft is 3/4" all the way up until it reduces for the retaining nuts at the top. The upper unthreaded portion has a keyway that is used to secure the gear. I attached some photos of the gear welded to the original collar. This collar has the key in it that indexes to the keyway on the shaft. Near as I can tell, I took a 5/8" ID gear and worked it out to 3/4" once I had it welded on the collar - it appears you could use a 3/4" ID gear and save yourself some trouble. I likely just ordered the gears and made it work. Removing of material won't be too bad, but I would do this after welding the gear to the collar/bushing. The most important part of this step is centering the gear.

The box disassembled:



You can see that I expanded the ID of the box gear to the right.....likely carefully opened up with a dremel:



Close-up of the collar welded to the new gear:



The key in the original collar:



5/8" ID was a fit for the handle gear:

I finished repairing the gears for the Atlas head and table lift. For whatever reason Atlas elected to make the gear teeth on these out of pot metal. Jtbinvalrico indicated his teeth had literally crumbled away and this lift had essentially the same problem. One gear was missing all together and the other sheared off the shaft bushing and as I was pulling the pieces out, it literally crumbled away. After ordering the gears from McMaster-Carr I got underway.

The first gear repair was actually easy enough.



I had to cut roughly half an inch off the gear body. I started with a very fine Dremel cut off wheel to get it started and then went slowly but surely with a hacksaw. Once I had it flat I drilled through and through and used the same sized taper pin that Atlas used.



Rides flat on the face of the gearbox cover.



Once that was done I moved on to the other gear. I had to cut a lot more material off on this one and then I had to hollow it out so the bushing could ride flat inside.



After cleaning out the material in the center I had to drill a 3/4" hole through the gear so it would accept the shaft.



I covered the entire bottom and sides of the gear void with JB weld, laid the bushing in it, clamped it up under my drill press and drilled both sides for expansion pins. Once these were in I made sure there was no excess JB weld and polished the inside as best I could. The reason I opted not to go with welding is I am not a welder and I don't own any welding equipment. In addition the bushing is primarily pot metal with a very thin outer shield of metal so that it can ride smoothly in the lower gear box bore. Although Jtbinvalrico made his work well I wasn't sure where a weld would even hold. By pinning two sides and using steel epoxy, even inside the pins, it feels very secure and there is absolutely no play whatsoever.





It is exactly the same length, down to the millimeter of an original that I used to compare. I did put the entire gearbox together and the gears mesh well and it works. I will not attempt to put it under load until it's had a couple days to thoroughly harden.



I have very little experience working with metal and probably for that reason this is a project I would not look forward to having to do again! I'm just glad it works and for all intents and purposes is stronger in every regard than the one I currently have on my drill press which uses pot metal gears.

Nice work! I like the idea of recessing of the collar into the underside of the gear......How'd you do that? It looks as if it were done with an annular cutter. If mine ever explodes apart I'll refer back to this before re-doing it......Solid research and a quality fix there, sir.

Appreciate that very much. I have very little machine tools, believe it or not that was done with a very firm drill press vise and a 1 1/8-in metal hole saw while using lots of oil and stopping often to take measurements. I cleaned up a lot of the metal by using a smaller hole saw and going in increments.

@jtbinvalrico I think I must have stared at that shaft gear for 1 hour before I made any cut at all. My goal was to have the shoulder of the bushing ride on top of the gearbox borehole as it did originally and it worked out. As I said in my previous post though, I wouldn't want to have to do that again!

So I popped open the gearbox to consider the shoulder on the bottom of the gear - it's important. Hoorn did a nice job of incorporating a shoulder into his fix. I mistakenly thought the box gear was somehow limited in its downward movement by the keyway. Not so. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to see that my less-than-stellar fix had not gouged up the upper face of that bottom hole. As insurance, I pulled it out and spent some time with a file giving the underside of the gear a smooth shoulder to ride on. Had I paid attention when I first did the fix, it would've been much more straightforward to just do it then.....Of course, the key inside the collar on mine is another matter. It's a nice, tight, clean fit over the shaft, so there's not a lot of wiggle room to eat away at it, but you can see the decades taking their toll. If it ever shears the key, I'll consider broaching the collar and making a key to mate it to the shaft. It's a non-issue now and may well hold up as it has.

@jtbinvalrico nice file work.

I thought about the prospect of "what now" if I lost the key because again, it's only pot metal. Your solution would be more sound, mine would be the "I'm not a machinist" solution and I would probably resort to running a solid pin or two through the bushing and threaded shaft. It could be done when the two are outside the gearbox. While mating the two inside the gearbox, before dropping the shaft gear down the bore hole I would insert the pins. These would be in the body of the bushing and shaft and of course not exceed the OD of the bushing. It could not escape once the shaft gear is dropped into the borehole and would be captured by the bore wall. That sounds like Plan Z, but if the key is busted there are few options.


Although I have been critical of Atlas (and Delta, Walker Turner, etc) for using pot metal in critical areas, the fact remains that of the six FrankLee has found, and my five, yours, only one had broken gears. But lots of other people have shared pictures and stories of their Craftsman or Atlas drill press wearing one of these lifts and I assume most or all of them worked properly. I'm sure it would have been noted if they had to do a major repair or that they would have reached out for advice from GJ.

Thank you for posting that follow-up work you did, it's helpful.

The pot metal is probably the same ZAMAC used on Atlas lathe speed/change gears.

Technically, they were using Zamac, not "pot metal" just sayin'. (But yes very similar)

Outlawmws said:

Technically, they were using Zamac, not "pot metal" just sayin'. (But yes very similar)

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When I say pot metal I'm being facetious. I referred to the use of zamak several times throughout my write-up. I just think that geared teeth should not have been zamak; similarly Walker Turner built an amazing bandsaw but then used zamak in their upper wheel guide assembly and they are notorious for stripping out. The entire upper wheel guide housing is cast iron and for the most critical part they use junk.

Hi guys, I purchased a craftsman 100 series DP with a table lift knowing one of the zamar gears was stripped - the one in the gearbox. Now I’m reading your threads to see how to repair. Im not a welder either. Can either of you tell me specifically which gears you ordered from McMaster-car? just curious, could these two gears be made on a 3-d printer?