Compound Drilling Table

I have been looking for a compound table for my bench drill,as the throat of the drill is 130mm it needs to be a small width table just enough to bolt a vice on. I have seen a couple on e-bay of good quality but are to wide so not much travel owing to a 130mm throat. What I have seen are these aluminium tables from China that are the correct size but at £ 40.00 are these any good, it will not be used a great deal as I have a milling machine, but sometimes I get fed up of changing to a drill chuck then to E32 collets four or five times when doing a job. Or any recommendations on the forum will be appreciated.

If you only have a small throat then what is the distance between table and spindle. often with these cross slides once on the table with a vice on top and a drill chuck mounted you have very little room for actual drill bits.

I tend to leave the work in the mill as I can use the DRO to get all my positions for both milled edges and hole ctrs, even if just using the handwheels this should be more accurate than swapping between machines and marking out holes by hand.

Also try and size your holes/drills to suit your ER collets so you don't have to swap over so often if you don't like tightening your collets right down

What are "these aluminium tables"? They sound as if they could be a version of the Proxxon type. In fact I see that there are a number of eBay sellers of Proxxon type knock-offs at prices from £25 up to at least £40. The original is not in my view very good - I bought one with a small Proxxon drill for clock making and have seldom used it (though it did get converted to a travelling microscope). The feed is rough, the quality poor, slides have too much play. And it's too small for clamping anything but very small components.

Have you thought of holding drills in the ER32 collets, given they have a larger gripping range? At least that means you don't need to remove the collet chuck. Or if you have drills that don't fit your collets, get a small chuck and make/buy a parallel arbor that you can hold in a collet.

Thanks for the replies, never thought of using my collets for drilling, I shall use them in future. As for collet drilling is it ok to use for example 5.7mm drill in a 6mm collet.

Yep, I often do a similar size combination for drilling then reaming. In theory you could hold a 5.1mm in a 6mm collet but I've never been keen to tighten them down that much.

Edited By JasonB on 07/08/2017 15:34:08

I've used collets for drilling as well and have turned the shank of a 4.3mm drill bit down to 4mm to make things a bit easier.

Alfie,

I have a 6" cross-vice mounted just about permanently on my large (12 speed 2B) bench drill, which is a very solid machine and there is a table rack, so I can crank the heavy table/vice combination up and down. To be clear, this is not co-ordinate drilling, just a way to grip the work and then simply position it under the drill using the cross-vice...

Anyway, I find it very convenient and wanted something similar for my much smaller Cowells 3/8ths drill - and I already had a smaller 3" cross-vice. Using an ordinary drilling vice (bolted to the slots in the drill's table) was at best fiddly and sometimes a real pain. The problem was that the cross-vice seemed much too heavy to mount directly on the Cowells table - even if I made some kind of adaptor plate to do it. So I made a set of simple 'lifting' plates (just plywood) that sit over the drills base plate and lift the cross-vice to a usable drilling height without damaging anything. The normal table swings out the way and (if not needed) the cross-vice just lifts off. The 9mm birch ply 'plates' are 1,2 and 3 'thickness' deep and can be removed in any combination to lower or raise the vice. Captive nuts in the base secure the M6 bolts that clamp everything together...

Just remembered an important point - the vice clamping 'handle' is normally on the 'wrong' end (e.g. the drills pillar end) for simple X & Y vice travel. So I drilled two M6 holes in the other end of the vice part and moved it. It just about misses the 'Y' handle - so not ideal - but you cannot use the (at least my 3" ) cross-vice without doing this...

So - not co-ordinate drilling - but much easier to set up and use than just a simple drill vice... Perhaps this helps..

Regards,

IanT

Edited By IanT on 07/08/2017 19:10:32

Alfie, ER collets close down to 1 mm below nominal size though it can be quite hard to get enough torque on them. A ball bearing nut from Arc is said to be a great improvement (though I manage without). Some of the normal imperial sizes are a bit uncomfortable - e.g. 1/4 inch needs 0.65 mm closing which is a bit difficult (though within nominal), so if you have a metric set it can help to get just a few imperial ones for the difficult sizes. Unless you are concerned about scale sizes it makes life easier also to standardise on a few metric (say) size drills that fit collets well. You could also consider making some sleeves to go round drill shanks - for example I have an 11mm drill I use a lot which normally has a 12.7mm split sleeve round its shank so it will fit in my mill in a 1/2 inch R8 collet. So maybe a 5mm sleeve round a 4.3mm tapping drill for M5 (or of course turn the shank down to fit a 4mm collet). As far as I can I avoid using a drill chuck. I use R8 collets in the big mill and as I have a number of ER16 collets for my little Novamill CNC, I have a short 16mm shank ER16 collet chuck that I can put in a 16mm collet to hold small drills (up to 10mm) - it can save a lot of twiddling the head up and down.

Sorry - old age creeping in - it wasn't the vice clamping handle that needed moving - but one of the movement screws - to enable the longer vice axis to be sideways one. New M6 holes drilled in the other end and the plate that holds the movement screw shifted to that end. Maybe a photo will explain it better ...

IanT

It looks like this from above...

The way I use to get round this is to use a parallel shank drill chuck. This one was originally used with my MT3 plain collets, and now with ER32.

As the shank is 3/4" it fits equally into the old 3/4" MT3 (hardly ever used these days), and the 19mm ER32. So just a collet change when using the ER32 range.  And it can drill and countersink or counterbore without another collet change.

Edited By Robbo on 08/08/2017 09:35:57