Ralph
Stumpe found this unusually slim-handled No.2 Millers Falls drill and
generously sent me pictures of it to publish here. There are
about equal chances that (a) it was made this way by Millers Falls (see the early No.1 eggbeater drills)
or (b) that it was refinished. I vote for the former provenance,
as it's really unnecessary to remove so much wood to smooth out a worn
handle. I started with a pile of splinters for my Type G example of the No.2 drill, and smoothing out the epoxy used to reassemble that handle barely changed its profile at all.
The No.2's handles did not hold up to the greater forces involved when
twist drill bits came onto the scene. This drill has a tubular
brass ferrule which wasn't heavily cold worked like the later
deep-drawn ferrules, all of which cracked from exposure to corrosion
(that's called season cracking,
by the way). This drill's handle looks wobbly because there's so
little wood inside that ferrule. The later drills' handles mostly
became wobbly because of their cracked ferrules. The No.1
eggbeater drills, with their smaller chuck capacities, never had these
problems.
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