I found this old hand drill, probably 100 years old. It was still working, but rusty and everything was wobbly. During restoration I tried to maintain function and the typical traces of a long and hard working life.
Some parts had to be renewed, especially shafts and the broken bearing. Thanks to my good old lathe, this was no problem.

I resisted the temptation to make all surfaces 'better than new'. It is easy to grind the handles down to 'new' or to paste up all casting irregularities with filler. But that's not my objective.

So I only cleaned the handles and smoothed out casting marks only for reasons of function and security. The rest of the typical roughness of old tools should be visible after restoration. After all it had left the factory with all these traces of a raw manufactoring process and it earned some more traces during it's working live. I think, this should not be deleted only for a 'perfect look'!

The best decision during restoration was to use nitrocellulose varnish. Acrylic varnish was not common before the 1940s and the rests of the original varnish definitely were no japanning. So ist must have been nitorcellulose. Difficult to find, but it made a wonderful deep black without covering the orioginal roughness.

If You enjoy my work, give me a 'like' or comment and subscribe to my channel the next video will be online in some weeks, a verry rare 110 year old drill press with centrifugal weights!