My shop, the #3 works

[JHuston]

Hello everyone, I'm James and I'm starting a thread on my shop (mainly basement with a garage annex) in the hopes it will help me stay motivated to improve my working space, clean out superfluous items and streamline my workflow as I go about my routine of maintaining house and home, restoring my collection of vintage power tools and machines and crafting the occasional piece of furniture.

I've been a power tool repairman for the past eighteen years ( I'm also a small engine repairman, but I prefer drill presses to lawnmowers), and for most of that time, I've collected items made by Porter cable and the companies related to them . Due to budget constraints, I've mainly gathered handheld tools into the fold ( 115 and climbing), but I have developed a fairly large stable of stationary machines ( not to mention a riding mower and lawn tractor).
I spend six days a week repairing power tools made from brightly colored plastic in SE Asia, and collecting and restoring vintage wood and metal working equipment is my stress relief.


I'm hoping to do some serious upgrading, especially to my garage, as my wife has taken an interest in delving into woodworking. Our garage is a ancient, model T-sized structure with a crumpled concrete slab, so one of the first things I plan on doing is breaking up the remains and pouring a new slab ( the footer is cinder block and sits outside the pad). I'll also need to run power out there, as the knob and tube wiring may be slightly inadequate.

Anyway, here are some photos.


My woodworking area, With the Hutchinson triplets,

And my Syracuse Sander 20" band saw,

And the metal working part featuring Millicent the Mulliner Enlund engine lathe ( and my little Burke milling machine , under construction),

And, of course, there's the toolcrib.

( How do you get 115 vintage power tools to fit on five shelves? With a funny look from your wife, apparently!)

Out in the garage, these two hold court,

The ever stylish Mark 26 riding mower,

and the mighty Mark 1 suburban tractor

Keeping my Lawn-Boy push mower ( one of the few non-Porter Cable related things I own) from getting lonely,

What can I say, I like old machines.

More to come,
James Huston

 

[Joe Fast]

Love those electric planers. Always two steps behind grabbing one online or at a sale. Nice collection.


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[JHuston]

Love those electric planers. Always two steps behind grabbing one online or at a sale. Nice collection.


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Thanks; my favorite is the UP ( leftmost, with the aluminum handle), both for looks and precision. Most of those are really meant for door planing, so they generally hang the motor too low to face plane, but I recently added a Versa-Plane to the stables, which can do both ( and will come in handy when i surface my Roubo-style workbench this winter).

-James Huston

 

[Joe Fast]

I do a fair amount of old doors and matching reproduction work here in NYC. I use a Bosch right now but would love an older P/C or Rockwell. Would also love to get my hands on an old lock mortising machine. I believe P/C made one. I remember my dad using one on a job site once back in the 80’s


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[JHuston]

Porter Cable did make a lock mortiser, the 513. I recently found an incomplete one from the early '50's, but they pop up ( although not cheaply) online from time to time. In their heyday, P.C. made virtually every door hanging tool known to Mankind. I have two hinge **** template guides, the door planers and now the mortiser.
If you're looking for a door planer, I run across 126's and 100-p's fairly often; I'd be happy to keep an eye open for you.

 

[JHuston]

Here are a few of the different planers, mostly ones that use a removable router motor for power.

This is a 523 kit,

The UP I prefer ( left) and the 150P kit,

and the 126, which is a dedicated planer ( and probably the most commonly found),

-James Huston

 

[bj383ss]

Wow this is fantastic!

Bret

 

[JHuston]

Here's one of my prized possessions , my Porter Cable S-1 oscillating spindle sander. I horse traded for a fixer upper. It was missing the entire internal mechanism, the table had a couple of grooves worn in it, the motor was missing, and the "duck foot" base was broken badly. Luckily for me, a fellow Porter cable collector is a tool and die maker and was able to fabricate all new internals from a donor head.

Before,

during,

and after,

-James Huston

 

[JHuston]

Another restoration that turned out well ( I hope no one is sick of this yet) was my Mark 26 mower. I wasn't actively looking for one, but the parents of some childhood friends asked me if I was willing to help them sort out the wife's father's tractor collection. In the process, I found the rear fender to the mower and rooted around in the piles of junk ( her dad, an Army truck driver in the European theater , was a fan of old tractors and a total packrat) until I found the mower wedged under a pile of scaffolding.


Before, with brushed on red paint,

all there, but with a crudely mounted auxiliary tank and a badly fouled carburetor, and after a bit of elbow grease, I had this,

The 6hp Lauson engine has enough oomph to power the mower nicely, and it really does do a presentable job of cutting ( for a mower blade that spins the wrong way). The tiller steering takes a bit of getting used to, but once mastered this mower will just about bend itself around corners. Besides, who wouldn't own a riding mower with fender skirts?
-James Huston

 

[Joe Fast]

Porter Cable did make a lock mortiser, the 513. I recently found an incomplete one from the early '50's, but they pop up ( although not cheaply) online from time to time. In their heyday, P.C. made virtually every door hanging tool known to Mankind. I have two hinge **** template guides, the door planers and now the mortiser.
If you're looking for a door planer, I run across 126's and 100-p's fairly often; I'd be happy to keep an eye open for you.

Please do.


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[JHuston]

Can do, Joe. I'll message you once I find a good candidate.

-James Huston

 

[cortina64]

Your collection of tools and your restorations are amazing.
I will be following this thread.
Warren

 

[JHuston]

Thanks , Warren; I'm glad I haven't worn out my welcome with all the photos!

One of the longest running quests of mine was to find a B-5 sander. During their heyday, Porter Cable employed a brilliant young designer named Art Emmons who is directly responsible for the first helical geared ( as opposed to worm drive) circular saw, the K-8 ,as well as the first portable belt sander ever made, the B-5.

I first tried to buy a B-5 when I was in my twenties , but was newly married and couldn't afford it ( it might have been all of a hundred dollars, but if you don't got it, you don't got it). In following years I missed out on another, and another. Despair set in.For eleven years , I tried to find one of these sanders that I could afford, and the average price had crept up to five or six hundred dollars in most cases.

Then I found my white whale.

A few years back, I met a fellow Porter Cable collector, a man who had been collecting for decades, and he made me a deal. It seemed he still had the first B-5 he had picked up ( he has a half dozen or so now), a sad you-know-what that had been badly abused and was now inoperable, missing parts, and very ugly. If I thought I could fix it, he said, I was welcome to it.

Twist my arm, right?

The sander in question was made around 1928, when P.C. redesigned it to add a wooden rear handle ( the original was an integral aluminum one and was a shock hazard in the days of power tools screwing into light sockets). Oddly enough, it had the earliest version of tag, from about 1926, when the model number wasn't included, because there was no other model (or make) of belt sander in existence.
Time had not been kind to the sander; it is still the most abused power tool I've ever seen. The sander had been dropped long ago, bending the front pulley bracket and causing the belt to track poorly. The resultant groove worn in the casting by the belt was "corrected" by welding the casting,which partially melted the tag, , then drilling a number of random holes to mount a piece of steel for reinforcement. The sander was then overworked until the windings started to burn up, but only set aside when the bronze worm gear finally stripped. Needless to say, I had my work cut out for me.

I started by welding the casting (properly this time, and with the tag off), and straightening out the pulley bracket,

I had to have a new worm gear made, send the motor out for rewinding and reconstruct the missing support roller and bracket. Since the original magneto bearings were ruined, I modified the sander to accept modern ball bearings. I also made a new top force cup for grease ( although it no longer needs it with the new bearings).

A bit of paint and some reproduced art and there she was, good as new,

(well almost).

-James Huston

 

[colt zantop]

Awesome stuff! Keep those pics coming!

 

[Tarnished]

Great seeing your work!
Show us more please!

 

[NUTTSGT]

Don't take this the wrong way, but the place looks like a museum. You know 'museum' is short for 'must see them'.

 

[JHuston]

Thanks , guys- I'm currently without a camera, so most of these photos are a few years old.
As a matter of fact, this is a project that was started ten years ago. I was contacted by another member of the OWWM site concerning a Porter Cable tractor in the Hudson Valley area of New York. This tractor had been put out to pasture in the '70's and was frozen stiff. The steering wheel was missing, the hood was long gone and the entire machine was a rust bucket.
Of course, I had to have it.
I was able to talk a friend into carting it across NY to Buffalo, where the girlfriend of a coworker was able to bring it the rest of the way to Ohio .
When I first laid eyes on it, it had to be drug into the shop ( my place of work, that is) because it couldn't be steered or rolled due to corrosion. It looked like this,

The tractor was a Mark 1, which I already knew; what was surprising was the fact that it was the electric start version with a 7hp Briggs @Stratton engine ( they were also sold with a Kohler 6hp that was manual start). The engine looked awful until I pulled the head and found that the hone marks in the cylinder were still clearly evident. The biggest issue with the tractor, other than years of neglect , was the starter. It was a somewhat undersized choice, being designed for a boat motor, and didn't have provision for starting the battery or running any accessories.

I love machines in this shape. You have nowhere to go but up.

I rebuilt the engine first ( My first real job was small engine repair, so I was well versed in this engine),

Then retro fitted a Briggs starter/generator,

This required some redesign of the engine mount brackets as well as the starter belt guard, but the hardest part was finding a spot ( in a very compact tractor) to mount the voltage regulator in the correct orientation. There is little extra space under a Mark 1 hood, but I made it fit. The original control panel had long since disappeared, so I exploited that fact by redesigning it to incorporate the needed room.

The tractor itself was an exercise in patience- it took most of an afternoon just to free the steering shaft from the column- but slowly, the tractor limbered up, shed rust and became a bit more dignified.
I was stumped for the longest time about the missing hood until I was visiting a friend (and fellow Porter cable collector) and happened to see an extra one next to his tractor. I pleaded with him, and he chuckled and handed to me, so now my little tractor had all the original bodywork again.
The gearbox is a simple, insanely robust design, and capable of more traction than a three hundred pound tractor with an eight horse engine can provide. One of the ads for this tractor showed it towing an airplane of some size; I buy it .

Ultimately, I chose to use this tractor to plow snow, even though it's a small machine. Porter Cable marketed both a snow plow and thrower for this tractor, and to be fair, what it lacks in mass it more than makes up for in willpower ( the Ag tires don't hurt, either). Early tests showed that snow gets in the operators back pockets without rear fenders, so I found a set from a contemporary Wheelhorse; now I even have lights and a place for storing some tools onboard, and the tractor now looks like, well, a tractor,

( all tractors need a pair of bugeyes. The rears are vintage bicycle lights retrofitted with LED's, but the fronts are sealed beams from an old Ford tractor).

The tractor can now be used with a snow plow (Wheelhorse), grader blade (Simplicity Broadmoor), 1500 watt generator (Winco) and pressure washer pump ( Cat), all scavenged and adapted as needed. Everything mounts to a bracket on the front of the frame rails.

The irony is, my wife and I live on a tiny city lot. But even if my yard isn't much, my grounds crew is top notch.

-James Huston

 

[Nermal43]

You certainly won't wear out your welcome with such excellent work. Keep them coming. Subscribed.

 

[1/2 Cup]

JHuston absolutely fantastic and thank you for sharing.

 

[bj383ss]

Tractor looks fantastic. And there is no such thing as too many photos on GJ.

Bret

 

[Joe Fast]

Tractor looks great!


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[MacTexas]

I like your vintage tools but what I really liked was you have a chalk board in your shop. I see plenty of shops with white boards but I can't remember one with a chalk board, really vintage!

 

[LXCam]

Wow what stunning collection you've amassed! I'm just in awe of your attention to detail let alone the ability to locate some really oddball pieces of equipment. I think your lawntractor is close to the coolest thing I've ever seen. Please keep the pics and the stories flowing.

 

[zmotorsports]

Nice collection. I especially like the riding lawn mowers. I could get used to those.

 

[JHuston]

I like your vintage tools but what I really liked was you have a chalk board in your shop. I see plenty of shops with white boards but I can't remember one with a chalk board, really vintage!

I have a tendency to leave things written on a board for long periods, and dry erase marker is hard to get off after a while, but chalk is easy to remove. On top of that, the chalkboard is metal, not slate, so I can use magnets to hold working drawings to it.

Nice collection. I especially like the riding lawn mowers. I could get used to those.

I enjoy both machines ( although I wish they had a bit more legroom) and have had a lot of fun customizing the Mark 1. I also have another Porter Cable gas powered tool,

When was the last time you saw a left-handed chainsaw? The 534 is a 20", 4hp goliath that weighs 30lbs and sounds like a really big dirtbike when it's running. I wish I'd thought to take a before photo, but it really wasn't in bad shape, just dirty from sitting in a barn. When I first rebuilt it, I took it to work, where we sell Christmas trees in the winter. It started up and ran fine for every cut ( about 200 or so through the season), but created a gender divide; women backed away from it and men ran toward it every time it fired up!

-James Huston

 

[JHuston]

One of the most complicated restorations I've undertaken for my shop was my metal lathe. I had traded in my first lathe, a South Bend 9", for a 10" Sheldon, but I was always on the lookout for a Mulliner Enlund engine lathe. M.E. was a lathe manufacturer in Syracuse, New York that was purchased by Porter Cable in the Spring of 1919 as an addition to their existing lineup of second operation lathes. The Mulliner Enlund lathes came in two sizes, a 12" and a 14" and in bed lengths from four to eight feet. The Mulliner was very cutting edge for its day ( seven years after the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg), with power feed and traverse, a quick change gearbox, toolless tailstock and a separate power shaft to save wear and tear on the lead screw.

One morning, I got it in my head to put feelers out again for a Mulliner; with in hours I got a response from a fellow I knew who was part owner of a small machine shop. "Are you serious?", he asked, incredulous that anyone would want such a specific, little known make of machine. It turned out he and his partner had purchased one for use in their fledgling shop until it was simply not big enough for the work they wanted to do. It had been retired to a storage container because he didn't have the heart to scrap it.

I bought the lathe sight unseen; I knew the seller, and he knew the lathe, so I didn't foresee any difficulties. Unfortunately, one problem immediately cropped up- weight. I learned to machine on a South Bend Heavy ten, and used a Sheldon 12" at work, so I was picturing a lathe of about 1,000 lbs or so.

Whoops.

I present one of the biggest machines Porter Cable ever put their name on; I call her Millicent, The Beast of Syracuse.

A 14" Mulliner with a six foot bed weighs well over 2,000 lbs without a countershaft ( these lathes were, of course, lineshaft driven when new). My new machine had been retrofitted, quite nicely, with an overhead drive of massive proportions from a South Bend 15" lathe , and with the old countershaft mounted to that drive and the period correct-ish General Electric 3 phase 1-1/2 hp motor, this machine tips the scales a bit shy of 2,700 lbs- not American Pacemaker or Lodge and Shipley territory, but a logistical quandary for me to get moved nine hours East and into a basement shop.

Luckily, I have some good friends, because it took two full sized trucks to transport it,

One to carry the ways, chip pan and legs, the other to handle everything else.

The lathe was covered in the bligatory grit,filth and swarf, and liberally coated with scaling, leperous gray-green paint.

As the parts arrived, I gave them a quick once over; some chipped gears, a sloppy apron and some broken off gates for the quick change gearbox, but nothing major. The ways were worn, as is to be expected with a hundred year old machine, but they were worn uniformly nearly the length of the ways, leaving the machine still capable of cutting a decent cylinder.

the ways were the hardest part to get home,

being both long ( Yours truly in the photo; I'm nearly 6'5" in workboots, to give things a sense of scale) and massively built. They alone easily weighed more than my Sheldon did complete, and they sat on a nearly 350 lb chip pan with two 180 lb legs.

I got them into the shop via a nearby window by means of an engine puller, which was somewhat nerve wracking, as it required lowering them one round of cribbing at a time onto the antique safe dolly I keep for these sorts of shenanigans.

Once I had painted and reassembled the base, it was easy enough to rebuild a component and hang it, moving upwards as I went.

I'm currently working on the necessary upgrades to my rotary phase converter to drive this thing, and the headstock decal will need to be reproduced at some point, but this grand old lady is ready to go back to work.

-James Huston

 

[JHuston]

I've been scrambling to get things done at work for several weeks now ( it's amazing how busy you are when you're the only mechanic in a repair shop), and my wife, Amy, and I just took a much needed vacation to New England. Now, I'm back in the shop and trying to build up momentum on tidying up the place.

About five years ago, I purchased a tool chest at the local flea market. Despite the '70's- ish Mac logo someone riveted to it, it appeared to be a fairly old chest, without ball bearing slides and featuring a peculiar lid and cover that stood proud of the case when closed. I was still at a loss as to the original brand when I found the remains of another chest. The lid had been removed, but the distinctive separation of the drawers proved it to be the remains of what was the exact match to my tool chest. Needless to say , I bought it for the princely sum of 10.00, and put it to work as a middle box, but I was no closer to an ID.

I was reading the Craftsman "long C" thread on the vintage tool collection when I started seeing photos of very similar chest, albeit with only two drawers; these either had a decal on the front cover , or a long, rectangular badge riveted on. I took another look at my top chest, and lo and behold, I found two holes that had been bondoed shut . The problem is, they were much too close together to fit the rectangular badge. On a whim, I measured the badge on my truck box, a Craftsman "Heritage box,

And I'll be darned if they didn't match exactly.

I'm still not sure when these two chests ( well, a chest and a half) were actually made, but it appears they were a sort of transitional box. I've since found images online of a upper and lower set that are identical, save for being fitted with the later beaded "Heritage " front. So far as I can tell, these boxes were most likely finished in gray wrinkle paint, so I managed to find an engine enamel that seems to fit the bill, and today, I got these two boxes a bit closer to the original appearance,

I'll need to knock the sheen down a bit ( I'm probably going to antique the finish- the boxes are a bit dented, and I think it's a shame to try and make them look like new; I like patina), and I'll need to find a "Heritage" badge to install, but I'm pleased with the progress nonetheless. I've been slowly gathering "long C" tools, so I'm hoping to put together a working set of tools a bit more dignified than the mish-mash of Proto I have now to fill it.

-James Huston

 

[1/2 Cup]

JHuston that is one stunning lathe.

 

[WarrenJ]

Really enjoyed reading your thread.

 

[JHuston]

JHuston that is one stunning lathe.

Thank you! The Mulliner is awaiting my rotary phase convertor build to get back in the saddle, but I'm planning to fabricate an undercutter attachment so I can turn armatures at home ( the war era Atlas/Craftsman at work is great, but bigger repulsion induction armatures don't fit so well). I'm planning on building a tool cabinet in the style of a wooden machinist's chest on steroids to hang on the wall behind it.


-James Huston

 

[Jyzze]

Lathe is beast! Great job!

 

[JHuston]

Lathe is beast! Great job!

I love my lathe,because when it's running, you feel like you're standing next to a steam engine; the ground throbs, you smell warm oil, and a black metal dinosaur clicks and grumbles a foot from your face. I've tried to keep to the time frame of the 'teens and 'twenties, so the Motor is a GE polyphase from about 1918, complete with a list of common repair parts stamped into its tag. I've cut all the parts for a duckboard out of quarter sawn white oak reclaimed from a bunch of barn rafters that needs built and installed- I hate crunching when I walk, and boy, can the old girl make chips.

I also need to get cracking on cleaning this mess up,

I can just about walk to the back wall, where I have my graveyard of Porter cable tools and parts. My Delta cutoff machine will be going to live with a friend of mine, who will use it far more than I ever will, so i'll have a bit more floor space. I'm thinking with making a baby lift for my riding mower so the tractor can be parked underneath. I'd really like to be able to sandblast and grind this winter.

-James Huston