So the 'almost free' will turn out to be a slight exaggeration, but I liked its alliterative quality. Fryeburg Fair, the annual one, is purported to be about the best country fair in the State. My Fryeburg Fair is more like a fair maid rescued from the drafty old basement of the Laird of the Lake.
Tennon machine, $ 300 table saw 5 hp three ph $300 old foot drill press $100 Fryeburg, Me.
That was the ad. No frills here. I had it in the back of my mind that I might have found a hollow chisel mortiser, but I didn't want the owner thinking it was anything other than the hunnert dollar old drill press he said it was. I asked no questions, simply got an appointment and right of first refusal. He did say as how he'd had a guy taking it apart to clean and paint it, and the guy had left suddenly with it disassembled. Music to my ears! (The four year old at this point, as a conversational aside, mentioned that someone had left suddenly due to a problem with smoking dope.)
Got to the house with wife and Waldo in tow and had coffee and brownies and a chat with his somewhat precocious 4 year old. Finally he says 'want to go down to the basement?' Ah, the assignation I desired was nigh upon me.
My gawd! The basement. He had purchased all the machines from an old Boston cabinet shop some years ago. American Machinery 16" jointer. Am. Mach. planer, ~ 24". Unisaw. W.W. Cary fixed arbor 14" table saw - f.s. at $300. Millbury Mfg. Tennoning machine - f.s. at $300. About a 12" b.s. with so much wood built around it as guards that I couldn't tell what it was. And then in the corner was #226, one strapping mother of a mortiser.
I think the guy must be well off. He has a four floor post and beam barn home that he built himself. The 38' hand-hewn beam down then center of the bottom floor he had made from a pine tree he felled in front of the house, he tells me, so that he could get his seaplane off the lake more easily.
Picking up old tools in Maine is nothing if not odd. My first odd moment came when a caterpillar than wasn't running attempted to run me down. I leapt. I looked. He smiled. He was towing it into the back of the shop with a ceiling hoist to get it out of our way.
We wrestled #226 onto a heavy-duty steel dolly and huffed and puffed it out into the drive. I am waiting to see what happens next when a huge machine, the 'bigger digger' he calls it, comes down the hill sounding like the arrival of a panzer division. I cringe, thinking of what might be next.
He pulls to a stop and hangs this monster bucket over me and #226. He climbs out and sets a chain on the bucket and then swings it over me so I can attach it.
I start to get the chain linked up and suddenly up goes the bucket. My hands have never been quicker. All my fingers are still there. I grin in camraderie and wave the bucket back down. Now the little girl rushes over to him and yells 'Daddy! Daddy! Can I get in the big machine?' 'Of course you can,' he tells her and plops her up into the seat about 7 feet off the ground. He turns to me, with the huge bucket hanging over my head, and calls over his shoulder to her 'Now, don't you touch anything.' She immediatey grabs a long, lethal-looking lever and pulls. I prepare to run. The four year old in the driver's seat beams at me: 'This is sooooo cooooool!' she yells. I note that she has an awful lot of teeth for a child.
But no, I can't run. I must stay under the bucket and get the chain on the mortiser and save it from this dysfunctional tool-home. Ten minutes later no one is dead, nothing is smashed, I have given him $100, and I am driving away. Blood of the Saints, another hunting party will return safely to the homeplace with the quarry safely snared.
This page was last updated on: August 14, 2006
To the left are the parts that had so far been taken off. Not a lot really. There is the large upper, and smaller, lower, babbitt caps, the flat belt drum inside the upper cap, the drill shaft that keys up inside the drum, and the chisel holder which bolts up under the main casting so that the drill bit slides down thru it.
Three threaded openings, two on the large, top, cap and one on the lower, take screw-down grease cups mounted horizontally to grease the babbitts.. 'Twould appear that vertical babbitts took grease that was forced in under pressure instead of an oil drip. No felt or oil grooves in these babbitts either.
This, for the moment, is it. All four quadrants are now non-vertiginously viewable.
I am assuming a huge motor - how huge, someone? - sits on that flat surface at the tiptop of it all, just behind where the flat belt drum will go. It would appear that a smaller motor needs to be mounted down low to run the crowned spindle that comes out the back of the blower, also right.
Nothing turns or moves very freely. Lots of cleaning to do, but I have a lot of old paint to get off, too.
The table does move in and out by way of the dual-handle, seen left, and tilts by hand, but does not move side-to-side.
It seems these machines came in at least two basic formats.
One version had more than one motor and the action of the chisel driving down was powered. Unless I am really missing something on this machine the driving force on the chisel is foot-power alone, and the motor is only driving the drill bit. The mortiser has been id'ed as a Greenlee No. 226. They also made a 227 and 228 mortiser with different features.
The march has been inexorably forward since the Freyburg Fair days when 226 was first picked up. Below are buttons for the teardown and the reassembly.
