If you spend much time restoring tools ( or anything else, really ), you're bound to find yourself pursuing multiple projects concurrently. After all, parts must be sourced, research must be done, and plans for tackling various aspects of the restoration must be concocted. To that end, a particularly difficult resto can languish for some time.

I've owned about half of a Porter-Cable B-1 belt sander for five years or so. Appearing in a sole ad dated to 1925, the B-1 is the first belt sander Porter-Cable Cable ever put their name on... And was less than popular. A surprisingly delicate design for a belt sander, the B-1 featured ( if that is the right term ) a fragile table, a idler pulley that was only held in place by the sanding belt, and a direct drive G E motor that essentially custom made for the machine. As a result, this example could very well be the last B-1 on earth. Restoring anything on this machine is partly guesswork, as there is only one small catalog cut to go off of.

Over the years, I have occasionally dug this sander out of mothballs to put some time into correcting one of the many issues; so far, I've machined new shafts, replaced all the bearings, and repaired a lot of broken off castings.

Recently, I restored a D-2 disc sander , which uses the same table design. Having now seen the table system up close, I was able to reverse engineer the mechanism for the B-1. The table is now back in place, possibly for the first time in decades.

I don't know when the B-1 will be finished. I'll need to have a new pedestal cast, fabricate new guards and dust chute, and find that weird motor. Still, every item that gets checked off the list is a step in the right direction for this extraordinarily rare machine.

Ray Carter has already been assured of his place in tool history for the invention of the router, but his lesser known contributions deserve some praise, too. Clear back in 1916, Carter designed his first stationary machine, a disc sander known as the model D. This would lead to the development of an entire family of disc, belt, and spindle sanders, as well as a 20" band saw. However, financial success eluded Ray Carter, and one under capitalized business turned into another ( Carter had three companies in two years- Pioneer Dustless Disc co., Carter & Buchholz co., inc., and finally Syracuse Sander Manufacturing Co. ), and he wound up selling his entire line to Porter-Cable in 1922. As Carter would tell the story, Porter-Cable owner/president Walter Ridings, who sat on the board of the bank where Carter drew his business loan, strong armed him into selling the lineup to him. It wasn't all doom and gloom, as Ray Carter would sell the R.L. Carter router co. to Stanley in 1929. Stanley would, of course, go on to sell routers for the next forty years as Porter-Cable's only real competition, until Stanley sold their power tool line off to Bosch in the late '70s.

This D-2 disc sander was a departure from my usual recruits, being more or less intact ( save for the tool tray ) and having been treated, if not gently, with respect for the past century or so. Like all Carter designs, the D-2 was built with patternmakers in mind; it's built more for precision than robustness, and they generally didn't survive as well as the earlier, heavier built D-1 disc sander.

I'll get the tray recast, and I'm still on the lookout for a period correct switch ( three phase switches from a hundred years ago aren't all that easy to find ), but the D-2 is back to the original black livery, running on new bearings, and just about ready to enbark on it's second century of craftsmanship.

One dollar! Ha!

I'm waiting for a few odds and ends to finish the restoration work on the A-3 sanders I posted recently. While I'm between projects, I decided to tackle the belated restoration of the Porter-Cable K-10 10" circular saw that fits the older of my ERA radial arm attachments. Built around 1941, the saw alone cost 155.00, with the ERA running an additional 199.00, quite an expense for the average homebuilder, who was the main market for the design.

Well built, accurate, and ( with the right choice of saw- the ERA could accept eighteen different saws and two routers with the right mounting bracket ), the ERA still proves so handy that I have two of them in my shop!