Millers Falls Hand Drills. The illustration at right appeared in the companys Catalog No. January, 1. 92. 9. It promotes one of the Millers Falls Companys most popular eggbeater drills, the No. Although the text at the bottom of the illustration would seem to indicate that the No. Having undergone several minor changes in numbering and still part of the line as late as 1. No. 2 easily rates it as one of the best selling hand drills of all time. Millers Falls Hand Tools' title='Millers Falls Hand Tools' />The popularity of the Millers Falls Companys drills and bit braces was, perhaps, the single greatest reason for the firms success until the 1. The Millers Falls Company was a leader in introducing hand and breast drills to the market place. Its contributions, however, were not quite the earth shaking events that the companys front office liked to make them out to be. In an article in the January, 1. Hardware Dealers Magazine, a special correspondent i. Millers Falls Company with the invention of the hand drill and the idea of adding a chuck to a breast drill. Neither idea originated with the company or its personnel. The firms contribution lay in the development of commercially successful, mass market versions of these productsa process simplified by an intimate understanding of chucks and bit holding devices. Hand drills are generally fifteen inches or less in length, are best suited for drilling holes in wood and light metals, and are most effective when used by a worker whose body is positioned above a work piece. They work best when operated at high speed and are especially useful for accurately drilling small sized holes without damaging delicate drill points. Hand drills are not to be confused with breast drills. Breast drills typically exceed fifteen inches and are topped by a concave plate that provides a surface which the user can lean against when boring a hole. Sometimes referred to as chest. Ruggedly built, the drills are useful for boring holes in iron, steel and extremely tough wood. Designed with the expectation that a worker would be putting a fair amount of body weight into a task, the breast drills are especially effective when used in a standing position, alongside the work piece. The distinctions between the two types are not hard and fast, however, and the Millers Falls Company manufactured a handful of tools that did not quite fit into either category. Several of its large hand drills exceeded fifteen inches. One was even fitted with a breast plate. Some of the companys breast drills came equipped with a D type handle, rather than the traditional breast plate. D type handles convert breast drills into tools especially useful for workers positioned above or below a work piece. The tools discussed in this part of the web site are those which the company chose to call hand drills those which the company labeled as breast drills are treated in the breast drill pages. Hand powered drilling tools and machines For most of human history, drilling a hole into whatever chosen material required an extensive amount of time and effort. The first crude drilling tool was the awl, a sharp stone, flint, copper or bone point that could be attached to a piece of wood. The awl was pressed against an object and then rotated by hand, much like a present day screwdriver. An alternative primitive method was the hand drill or shaft drill, where a stick was rotated between the palms. Abrasives such as sand could be used simultaneously to make this drilling method more effective. Millers Falls Hand Tools' title='Millers Falls Hand Tools' />These were extremely labour intensive tasks, especially when the material that had to be drilled was hardy, like stone. In his study of ancient stone working technology see sources, Denys Stocks came to the conclusion that even with a bronze drill bit it took up to 5 hours to drill a tiny hole 1 centimetre deep in a hard stone like quartz. Drilling holes into hard stone was commonplace in ancient times, for example in construction work and the making of necklaces and bracelets, so it is not surprising that our forefathers were investigating more efficient drilling methods with fervour. Strap drills, bow drills and pump drills. The first step toward mechanisation was the strap drill also known as cord drill or thong drill, which offered an increased rotation speed of the drill bit. SPIRAL-DRILL-PUSH-DRILL-HAND-BEADING-JEWELRY-TOOL-BEAD-/00/s/NjUyWDk2Ng==/$%28KGrHqNHJCME7zB5TcL5BO+8SCdI+w~~60_12.JPG' alt='Millers Falls Hand Tools' title='Millers Falls Hand Tools' />The tool consisted of a drill bit attached to a longer wooden shaft, which was rotated by wrapping a cord or leather strap once around it and holding the ends with ones hands by pulling in one direction and then the other, the shaft spun and drilled into the material. The top of the shaft rotated freely in a mouthpiece which was held between the users teeth to exert more downward pressure. The tool was also used to make fire, which is the reason why it is also known as a fire drill. The strap drill was widely used, but was eventually superseded by the bow drill, which appeared at least 6,0. Egypt. Based on the cord drill, the difference was that the cord or strap, again wrapped once around the shaft, was tied to a bow. Holding the drill vertically and the bow horizontally, the user then moved the bow backward and forward much like a cellist to revolve the shaft picture on the right, by Rudolf Hommel. A study of the tools and history of the Millers Falls Company, a Massachusettsbased hardware manufacturer. MILLERS FALLS COMPANY The most recent and best history of the Millers Falls Company is that of the outstanding web page published by Randy Roeder. Millers Falls village, it should be remembered, is one of the manufacturing villages in the town of Montague. With Turners Falls it holds threefourths of the. Plainly put you wont find any junk here. I sell the brands of tools that I want to use Stanley, Millers Falls, Disston, Atkins, Simmonds, etc. Tools are cleaned. N.805463936_20ts.jpg' alt='Millers Falls Hand Tools' title='Millers Falls Hand Tools' />VSC1180 Millers Falls 192 Geared Brace, This Was Only In One Catalogue 1915, This Is The Rarest Brace Millers Falls Made, The Crank Or Gear Swivals Whick Makes This. Learn about the tools and trades that made America. Includes events, a list of officers and directors, some history of the organization, articles and related links. The bow drill possessed two advantages over the strap drill the shaft could be rotated at a higher speed, and as only one hand was needed to handle the bow, downward pressure could be exerted with the other hand instead of the mouth. Smaller bow drills were also used for dental care. The tool could be made from a few pieces of wood, a piece of string and a drill bit. A later improvement to the bow drill was the pump drill, which appeared in Roman times picture on the left, source. It is similarly operated, except it functions by means of a downward instead of sideward movement. Sandor Nagyszalancy explains how it works in his book Tools Rare and Ingenious Pump drills get their name from the way theyre used. Pumping the crossbar up and down causes a string to wind and unwind at the shaft, thus spinning a pointed bit thats fastened to the end of the shaft back and forth. The thick, rounded section just above the bit serves as a small flywheel to keep the spinning motion going. Once more, the pump drill offered superior rotating speeds and more downward pressure. All these ancient drills were used in conjunction with a sharp drill point or with the help of abrasives especially when drilling through stone. Pump and bow drills which could not work without ropes and knots are among the most successful tools ever made. Bow drills were still used in the western world at the end of the 1. Bow and thong drills operated by several people. The Chinese were especially keen on the above drilling tools. They relied on bow, pump and thong drills up until the beginning of the twentieth century and never developed any of the drilling tools that will be discussed further below. Rudolf Hommel photographed some of the Chinese drilling devices in his book China at work. Chinese shipbuilders employed a larger version of the thong drill which was operated by two to three people. It was used for drilling the preliminary holes for the iron spikes which they utilized in ship construction. Henry Chapman Mercer describes the tool in his 1. Ancient Carpenters Tools To work the apparatus, the thong is twisted around the spindle, whereupon one man holds down the pivot handle, thereby pressing down the drill bit into the wood, while two other man, each grasping the thong by one of its terminal handles, or one man holding a thong handle in each hand and pulling the thong to and fro, cause the drill to twirl back and forth, as with the common bow drill. The thong drill. Picture from China at work by Rudolf Hommel. According to some historians, the Egyptians also made use of large bow drills operated by several people to make large holes and to hollow out spaces in their pyramids. Bronze hollow tubes of about 1. Even larger holes could have been made by performing several drilling operations right next to each other, in a circular form. The core drill allows for larger holes without sacrificing drilling speed, because much less material has to be reduced to powder. Denys Stocks conducted real life experiments to see if this method could work, and succeeded. The results indicate that two drillers were required to push and pull a large bow, while a third person balanced a stone drill cap on top of the shaft to exert downward pressure. Stocks achieved a drilling speed of 2 centimetres per hour in granite stone, and thinks the ancient Egyptians could have reached speeds of 1. Whether or not the ancient Egyptians applied this technique remains open to debate, though. Archaeological remains of these tools have never been found, and unlike smaller drilling operations common bow drills, stone drills to hollow out granite vases these large scale operations were only vaguely alluded to in wall paintings. Augers, gimlets and reamers. Another very important invention from Roman times was the T shaped auger and the much smaller gimlet. Basically a long drill bit with a pair of wooden handles for rotating it. The tool looks a like an oversized corkscrew picture on the left, source. Augers were used to drill large andor deep holes in wood, for which the bow or pump drill was not very useful. They were applied by shipbuilders, bridgebuilders, millwrights, wheelwrights and the like. In the Middle Ages augers were sometimes equipped with a breastplate on top for more drilling pressure the user could rest the entire weight of his body on the pad. However, operating them was a tedious task. Download Running Man Episode 171 Exo. The Roman writer Vitruvius noted that the difficulty of the boring increased exponentially with the diameter of the hole. Apart from drilling holes, an auger was also used for reaming enlarging an already existing hole.