I have a wood frame boring machine (no name on it).
The wood frame is in good shape but the rails that the drill arbor slides up and down have popped two screws loose and I tried gluing in small slivers of wood in but the screws have worked loose again.
The rails are also about 3/16 too close together. This allows a lot of movement side to side of the drill arbor.
Could shrinkage over the years cause this?

I am contemplating rebuilding the frame to accomodate the old hardware. Any body else done this?

Thanks
Bob

I deal in restored TF tools and have rebuilt quite a few wood framed boring machines. First, check the tightness and parallelism of the 2 main base pieces. You may be able to restore the correct spacing of the vertical rails by either tightening the 2 base cross bolts or by removing some wood from one of the 2 small wood base cross pieces. As far as the stripped hole, I usually drill the hole out slightly larger then the screw, say 3/8" and epoxy a dowel plug into the drilled hole. That just about always works.

If you end up convinced that you need need to replace some or all of the wood pieces, it's just straight forward casrpentry. If the verticals are 7/16" mortise and tennon with the base, make the new ones with 1/2" so that you can cut the slot in the base with a standard, readily available, mortising bit.