Bod":w1h5vhb0 said:
Looking at your link, there's only 3 years between Chapman selling and my drills date, so both as possible.
Anyone know when the casting moulds were changed?
That would be hard to work out - without inside knowledge from a former employee or company records.
The wheel certainly is the same as the Stanley wheel. But there would probably have been a number of patterns in use, with new patterns being made as older ones wore out. So whether they altered the old patterns, or replaced them with new patterns after the buy-out, who knows?
I can't imagine that orders so great that they had to dig old patterns out to keep up - more likely they had lots of old castings that Stanley didn't want to use, but hadn't yet been melted down. As a gesture to the government (to show they were being frugal for the war effort) they used the old castings for a government order. This is all speculation of course.
When it came to planes, Stanley ditched Chapman's "Acorn" design, and replaced it with planes so similar to Stanley USA type 16, that I would suggest the first Stanley plane patterns used in UK were likely made in USA (I would not be surprised if some of the first castings were also supplied from USA with "Made in England" cast into them - for machining and assembly in UK - again speculation). However, within a few years the UK planes show distinct changes from their USA equivilents. And then of course they switched to using Qualcast for their castings.
Obviously Stanley liked JA Chapman's No.105 eggbeater drill (your drill), and didn't ditch the design, but turned it into their now famous No.803.
Cheers, Vann.
