Drill Press Buying Advice

Any chance you could take a couple of photos of the underside of the table ? I suspect the tilting bracket is just cast on the end of the table with no gussets - If you have a mill then making a stiffener bracket may be possible .

My taiwanese drill press had two really annoying attributes - no matter how much i tightened the tilting table it would move under pressure , i ripped it apart then discovered that one mating surface was flat but the other was dished so it only had a small contact area and a skim in the lathe sorted that but it also had issues with the morse faper - no matter what i did the taper would not lock in so i took to it with a morse taper reamer and it is now rock solid - well as solid as one could expect from a reasonably cheap drill press !

Modify and conquer i say !

Have exactly the same table Neil on a NuTool DP16-12 with 3/4hp British motor.
Unused the last 26 years gathering dust, only had about 2 hrs running time. The table flexes like no tomorrow, larger drills deflect outwards, small drills deflect inwards towards column.
Also has a much beefier column the reason i chose it at the time from Graham Eng Wolvo in 1992 £230 then.

An old small Fobco with a 1/3 hp motor and spindly column was a damn site more rigid.

It's not impossible that the table support castings have been beefed up some time in the last quarter century. I can only report as I have found, it's vastly more rigid than my old budget drill press was.

Neil

I got similar readings to Neil's on both my drill presses out in the shed this morning, just mucking about.

The first drill press was a Chinese Craftmaster brand, very large and heavy with a 3/4hp motor and rated to drill up to 16mm holes. With two hands on the handle and as much force as I dared, table deflected .010" (about 0.25mm) at the midpoint. With max pressure from one hand, as might be used in very aggressive drilling, deflection was .005". With more normal drilling pressure from one hand, deflection was 2 to 3 thou.

My Australian made Waldown drill press of 1970s vintage is not as large or heavily built but was a very expensive machine when new (thousands of dollars!) showed pretty much the same deflection under the same conditions.

Just something to bear in mind next time I'm drilling and reaming a model crankshaft and striving for perfect alignment between crankpin and mainshaft holes.

Edited By Hopper on 31/08/2018 03:58:44

When doing heavy drilling in the drill press it's worth putting a prop of some sort under the table at the outboard edge, you will then find that the only movement is the drill head, have not got a cure for that.

Ian S C

With a bit more time on my hands this morning,I dug out my Aldi 5 speed bench drill [been buried for the last year]

.Set it up on the bench and drilled a 5mm pilot hole,then reduced speed and went straight to 10mm with no problem. With a further speed reduction,11.5mm. Did not experience any real flexing using the 11.5,so I think there may be something not quite right with your drill,but do check your drill bits,no machine will cope with blunt drill bits.

But why would you step drill an 11.5mm hole?

Sorry this is a bit of a late follow up, but in the end I went on Neil’s advice and bought one of the Clarke drills (in this case the CDP452F from Machine Mart). After a few month of ownership I’m very happy with both the drill and the service from Machine Mart. I certainly don’t have any of the problems I showed in my opening video. Thanks for all the advice, it proved useful, and hopefully also useful to people reading this in the future!

David

If the rest of the drill press is OK, quill has good fit, chuck good, motor good, etc. I'd try a reinforcing angled brace from front underside of table back and down to the column. If you face the brace with a block of brass or bronze next to the column you will avoid marking the column and still have excellent support. A vertical brace from end of angled brace up to the table rear underside would triangulate the assy and make it very stiff. As others have mentioned re the apparently rubber table I would also examine table and mount for cracks and fix those with epoxy and screwed strips or bronze welding etc. before bracing it.