Arbor press adaptation

[ken cierp]

KIS ---- several #64 rubber bands will work fine. The spring on one of my drill presses broke and that's how my spindle return has worked for about six years now -- you will have to replace the bands occasionally.

[Tim Benware]

I did that, here it is hard at work. I have a friend who is a gun smith and he did it for me on his lathe.

[Jay McClellan]

Mine is a fairly cheap Palmgren arbor press from Enco and it came with a punch set so it already had a hole in the column and a magnet to hold the punch. The hole was a bit bigger than the shank of the StewMac cauls so I just needed a bushing around the shank, and the magnet is strong enough to hold it in but I can easily switch back to a punch. I used a little bungee for a spring return and I attached a socket on the other side of the shaft so I can plug in a torque wrench to press in every fret with the same force, works nice.



Edit: I realize using exactly the "same force" on every fret may be less than perfect as the fretboard changes in width, but I think that's a relatively minor variation compared to my first attempts without the torque wrench where I either under-seated them or crushed the wood. I just adjust it to seat the frets well in the middle of the range and it seems to work fine across the board.

[peter havriluk]

Jay, Mr. Goldberg would be proud of you...and the torque setting is.....? (yes, I know, 'enough', but maybe a starting number?)

Thanks very much.

[ken cierp]

Clever use of the torque wrench!

[Jay McClellan]

The resulting force will depend on the diameter of the pinion gear in your press but as a starting point, my torque wrench is set at 35 ft-lbs or 5.5 M-Kgs and that seems to work well for me. I don't know the diameter of my pinion gear but I think mine is a 1-ton press, which I'm pretty sure would be enough to cut a fretboard in half but I bought the bigger press thinking I might have other uses for it.

[Dave Bagwill]

I've not drilled any heavy metal with my drill press. What is the procedure/type of bit, oil etc that I need to consider in order to make the 1/2 ton arbor work?