post drill? Cole drill? value?

Grant - have a picture somewhere - I have seen Cole Drills - powerful in fact. It is more or less a bench top sitter - doesn't go to the ground. It uses a large gear - hand crank - that turns the drill and slowly cranks down via a high thread screw. It is really cool driving through a thick chunk of steel.

Martin

I have a Cole vise that was my first smithy vise. It came with one of the drills, but that has since been lost. The drill was as described, 1/2 chuck, and resembled a big C-clamp with the chuck where the "button" would be. The work went on the other end, which could mount a flat stop or serrated V-jaws for pipe and round stock. There was a big nut just on the other side of the C-frame from the chuck that advanced the chuck. The C-frame clamped in the vise if you wanted, giving you a sort of crude but heavy-duty post drill.

The vise pivots, but unlike a machinist's vise it pivots on the axis of the vise screw; you can turn the jaws all the way upside down and back up the other side. The jaws are non-parallel, like a post vise, and there's a socket in the bottom of the vise body so you can install a pipe or post between the vise and the floor, for support like a post vise's leg. You can also stick a long pipe in there and use the whole vise as a giant wrench--it has pipe jaws just below the regular jaws.

The vise is more versatile than a small leg vise, not as rugged as a big one. I think I gave $75 for vise and drill, still in the factory cosmoline. The seller said he'd bought a lot of several hundred at auction, apparently made for WWII and forgotten in a warehouse, then sold off as surplus thirty years later.

Conrad Hodson