As well as toolpost, drill, flexible-shaft and hand grinders, the America Dumore company also made - over many decades - several small, very high-speed drill presses including one for jewellery work, the Type A, with a lever-action lifted table and a motor built into the head casting. These drills were not intended for heavy work and generally had a capacity limited from a No.80 drill bit to 1/8" in brass, aluminium, copper, plastic and other relatively soft materials. Still available today - as the Series 16 Sensitive Drill Press - it remains in much the same form as the earlier versions, though with the motor built into the head and not a separate unit from one of Dunmore's regular lines. Fitted with a column in solid steel and a cast iron base, the drill is very heavy and rigid; it has a head that can be adjusted up and down the column and then locked in place, the drill feed being by lifting the table using handwheel-turned rack-and-pinion gearing. Large, easily-gripped and turned handwheels are provided that make adjustment of the various parts as easy as possible. The DC motor fitted drives the chuck directly, speed being varied by using either a foot or table-top controller. Another American-made high-speed, high-precision drill press with similar characteristics is the Cameron, a machine also still in production.
One drill press discovered appears to be very different and, with its box-like structure and a large, rectangular and flat table suggests that it might have been a one-off, special order for something like work on early printed circuit boards. The machine carries a badge that, although it cannot be read, finishes with the number 10.80 - so suggesting that the range of "Numbered Drills" that it was intended to work with would have ranged from a No.10 (0.1935") down to a No.80 (0 0.0135").
A very special Dumore precision drill press was also produced with a round table attached to a screw-feed driven compound slide assembly that allowed longitudinal and traverse movements. Each axis was fitted with a dial indicator and the table's elevation, by rack and pinion gearing, incorporated a micrometer depth stop with an especially large dial. For accurate spotting a microscope was also fitted. The unit, which might have been made by the English concern Kelston Engineering in Fishponds, Bristol (who built Domore machines under licence) was supplied to the Ferranti - once an important company prominent in power grid systems and defence electronics - and, in 1951, the maker of an early computer, the Ferranti Mark 1.
More on Dumore drill presses here..