Quote:
Originally Posted by Hampus
However much I enjoy the look and sturdiness of these old drills, I must admit that I never felt comfortable using metal cased drills. I have such an old drill myself but much prefer the later plastic ones.
Sure, I do have many other metal-cased electric items at home as well, but a drill tends to lead a harder life than say a kettle or a toaster. And you often hold a drill with a firm grip, sometimes with both hands and sweaty palms.
They sure are beauties though.
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Yesterday, I got out some of my old drills and their safety supplies for a photo opportunity in the sun. So there's absolutely no need to worry about the likelihood of being electrocuted by your old metal cased drills when used as shown below, with either a generator or an isolation transformer.
The vintage generator shown below has a bit of a story. I'd been thinking of buying one for some time to use in the vintage caravan, which only uses 12 volt battery power. A chap who I knew from off 'the radio' said he had an old one that he hadn't used for years and would now no longer start, but that if I wanted to get it running, I could borrow it. I didn't get round to taking him up on this offer at the time, but a year later I asked him if the offer was still open and he told me that he'd just bought a brand new one and I could have the old one if I wanted to come and pick it up. I went to collect it and he told me that he'd had it for around 30 years and that he'd tried to start it a few years ago and it wouldn't go. I got it home and spent about a day on it. The petrol had dried out and left the usual brown gunge in everything. Someone had at sometime tried to fit a spark plug that was too long which not only had marked the top of the piston where it had come into contact with it, but had also taken a small chunk out of the very top of the cylinder, luckily not where the rings swept. It now runs perfectly and its original owner reckons it probably hadn't had any more than around eight hours use in its entire life. It's actually a genuine 240 volt output, unlike a lot of ones now, which I think are only 220/230 volt outputs at most. It's not very powerful being around 400 watts, unlike modern ones of a similar size, but it'll be a lot better made being genuine Kawasaki and not badge engineered, as many are today and it'll run all the power tools shown below. Its previous owner has since found me the original manual for it and a special cover for running it outside when it's raining, but I think that this cover is rather of ex-military origin, than actually made for that generator.
Shown below are a selection of old power tools using both the generator, which is actually running in that picture, although obviously you can't tell it is, and the RS mains isolating transformer as the other option. The generator, being vintage is full of asbestos, made at a time when items like this could still be sold so long as an asbestos warning label was stuck on to the outside of the case, perfectly safe for outside use, though!
Although the generator may seem to some to be 'off topic' for this thread, it is actually very 'on topic', as it's the ultimate safe way to run all your dodgy old power tools if you're at all worried about doing such things in a safe manner
