What have I gotten myself into!: “Tooling up”

A good drill press is a great addition to any shop, and is an invaluable tool for a variety of situations.

Unfortunately most inexpensive drill presses (made in China - check your label, you'll be surprised) have junk components that can cause the drill bit to be unable to cut a round hole. Usually this is due to a cheap chuck that is not properly parallel to the quill, and forces the bit to travel in an elliptical fashion. While this is marginally acceptable for wood working, where tolerances are a bit laxer, it is totally unacceptable for precision metal work.

As much as I would like to buy American made products, quality American presses are out of my price range, if I want to be able to equip my shop with more than just one tool. So, Chinese it is (again). Sigh!

I bought my press when it went on sale at Northern Tools, so that I was able to buy more press for the same money.

I should really repaint that floor

The box weighed 160 lbs, nearly half of which are located in the head of the press. Can you spell... top heavy?

All parts were coated in oil to prevent rust from forming during shipping

As always, I find myself alone every time there’s some heavy lifting involved, so I ended up assembling it on my own. This turned out to be quite a struggle, and it would have been far better to lure some unsuspecting neighbor in my shop with the promise of free beer. Between the weight of the components, and the oil that was covering every part of it, the process looked more like a mud bog wrestle event than anything else. Nevertheless I got this thing together without banging it up too badly.

Final resting place

When I finally turned it on for the first time, the top cover rattled like a sidewinder in heat. No matter how much I hit it, this cover was determined to make me lose what's left of my hearing. Rummaging through a box of leftover stuff, I found a piece of fuel line from my deceased 1982 Honda. So I sliced it the long way, then cut it in three pieces, and used them around the perimeter of the top cover as bumpers.

Noise gone!

1982 technology to the rescue

With the rattling taken care of, I decided to drill through some wood to test things out. Unexpectedly, after the first inch of travel into the soft material, the drill bit, the quill, and the spindle froze. Crap! A little head scratching later, I discovered the top spindle nut so loose it came right off.

Non existant quality control

As luck would have it, I just happened to have the huge 32 mm socket that fit the nut, so I tightened it snug. Drilling through wood was now no longer a problem.

Since garage floors have a natural slope, I made some leveling devices out of a bolt and two nuts, one below, and one above the pedestal (times twice).

Home made leveling devices

Although I had high hopes for a relatively decent chuck, I prepared myself mentally to having to replace it. Sure enough, even China's finest chuck was off by a light year, and was sent to the scrap pile where it belonged.

Introducing the “Little Machine Shop” keyless chuck (plus arbor), made in the USA and straight as an arrow... aka another $40 down the drain!

New chuck to the left, old clunker to the right

At this point I had a decent device for drilling holes, but there were still two more issues to be solved before I could take advantage of all this accuracy.

Issue #1 = How to hang on to the piece to be drilled.

I chose to equip the press with a quick action vise (awesome!), for ease of handling numerous parts needing to be drilled. I found it on amazon.com for 25% less.

Issue #2 = How to get the center of the hole-to-be precisely under the drill bit.

I decided to go all out, and add a compound table with which I will be able to position the part exactly under the awaiting drill bit, and do so with a repeatable level of accuracy regardless of how many holes I need to drill in a part. This I bought straight from grizzly.com, since the price was the same everywhere else I looked.

Yes, this vise is huge. Yes, I thought it was going to be smaller. And yes, bigger is better!

If I were a piece of metal waiting to be drilled, I'd be afraid right now

Tight quarters, but serviceable

I cannot wait to start drilling something!

UPDATE: I finally purchased some precision measuring equipment, and was able to accurately measure the runout error of my drill press using both of my chucks (not at the same time, duh). Well, a man has to admit when he's wrong. So, contrary to what my naked eyes led me to believe, it turns out that both chucks have a similar and acceptable level of error, in the order of 3.5/1'000" about 1" away from the chuck. Being that the error is nearly identical between the two of them, I am inclined to believe that the spindle might be the cause of it, but it is minute enough not to matter.

In the two videos below, every line of the instrument equals half of 1/1000 of an inch. What you'll see is about 6 to 7 lines being crossed by the needle during its travel, so we are talking about 3 to 3.5 thousands on an inch deflection from true circular motion.

Viewing Tip: The needle is hard to see in this small window, and the "Full screen" button doesn't appear to work in Safari. To see it more clearly, click on the "YouTube" logo (near the bottom right of the window) to open these videos in YouTube, then select a higher resolution, and click the "Full screen" icon (bottom right).