With their plant on the waterfront of St. Louis, Missouri (where the famous Gateway Arch is today) the W.B. Knight Machinery Company was founded in 1891 by William B. Knight, a bicycle manufacturer. By 1905 sufficient engineering and financial progress had been made for incorporation as the W. B. Knight Machinery Co. that went on to manufacture a range of drilling and milling machines and jig borers. From reports, it appears that although W. B. Knight machine tools were designed and sold by the W.B. Knight Company, they were manufactured for them by the John Ramming Machine Company of St. Louis. After Mr. Knight died, John Ramming Machine purchased the designs and rights to the Knight name from his estate and then specialised in and market rotary tables for many years.
The first machine shown below must have been in production in the first few years of the 20th century. A patent application for a "Work Support for Milling and Drilling Machines" that featured an almost identical model was made on the 1st of March 1907 and granted (No. 895,095) on the 4th of August 1908. The machine was a most unusual version of what is commonly now called a co-ordinate drilling machine. Usually, this term is applied to a drill (or light-duty milling machine) fitted with a screw-feed compound table that allows jobs to be bolted down and the X and Y axis screws manipulated to being it beneath the drill bit. In the case of the W.B. Knight several other manipulations were possible including swinging both the whole head and the table around the column and tilting the table to the left or right.
Carried in a casting running on ways formed on the front face of the column - and counter balanced by a chain-suspended weight within it - the quill was controlled by a lever acting through rack-and-pinion gearing.
In addition to the compound table, the machine also had a plain-surface round table, this being carried in its own bracket and needing the normal table to be removed before it could be lifted into position. The table must have been of the type that could be rotated and so perhaps jigged up with a ring of jobs but, as there was no provision - slots or holes - to hold them in place, one wonders what its value would have been.
As expected, at the top of the spindle was single-step pulley to take a flat belt, but the drive comes from a rear-mounted pulley set below and not in line with it. The patent drawing offers a slight clue in that the final drive belt might have been twisted - and so left the spindle pulley at a downwards angle. Unless the writer is missing something important (and he probably is) it does appear to be a very odd arrangement.
If you have a machine tool by W.B. Knight, the writer would be pleased to feature it in the Archive.