Drill press squeak fixed!

I think since the day I got it several years ago, my drill press has squeaked.  It happened – every time – when I turned the chuck by hand a little to orient the hole for the chuck key to a convenient place.  It’s fine when it’s running.

I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but have tried a couple of times to make it stop – to no avail.  When it annoyed me today, I finally caught it.

I pulled the belt off the speed change pulleys, and (like always) turned the quill pulley by hand.  No noise.  But this time I turned the motor – and it squeaked!  Wow – it’s narrowed down!

But what’s squeaking?  I dribbled a little oil into the top bearing – no change.  Looking through the cooling slots near the bottom of the motor, I could see a mechanism – which turned out to be the centrifugal switch on this single phase motor – and that seemed the likely culprit.  I was temped to just spray some oil all over it, but I didn’t understand how it worked, and didn’t want oil on the actual contacts.

Google images provided lots of pictures, but none looked quite like mine.  Then I looked through the slots on the other side of the motor – and there were electrical contacts!  Now if I could see what was rubbing, I could lube it without getting oil on the contacts.

I finally divined that a disc was rubbing against a protrusion on the contact mechanism.  This was by design – it’s how the contact is operated.  I put a drop of oil on the end of a long scribe, carefully inserted it through a cooling slot and deposited the payload pretty accurately right where the disc and protrusion met.  I spun the motor back and forth a few times – and the squeak was gone!  The arrow points to a bit of shininess that’s probably oil at the critical spot.

That’s been bugging me for years.  Now the fix will come back and give me a little pleasure every time I use the drill press.  Excellent.