Tool of the Day

So we're Shopsmith fanatics around the shop and the other day we picked up a 60 dollar Shopsmith off Craiglist. The Shopsmith is an amazing tool for horizontal boring and its a great drill press too but going back and forth gets old. 'Specially when your working on a dozen guitars and I forgot to bore something after you stood it up.

So we did this:

Took both apart 

Made an 1.5" thick ply core set of end caps for the rails

Bam! One fixed in the boring position and one fixed as a drill press! 

Nice thing is there is nothing permanent here so we could easily go back to 2 separate machines. When we get a little free time we'll go through and restore the "new" one.

shopsmith

I recently picked up an old Shopsmith MKV for free. We tore it apart last week, cleaned it up and started using it as our new drill press and horizontal boring machine (amongst other things...).

Here is my tele output jack alignment jig. Screws down to the table and indexes the bodies for drilling.

Here is a body on the machine ready to be drilled.

And the final product. Not bad for a 50 year old machine!