122VIDEO Drill Press Tour

So in this video, I want to introduce you to the drill press

This is the second drill press I've owned. It's a fairly fancy one. You don't need one this fancy

A drill press is an old-school stationary power tool and like a lot of old-school tools that aren't leading-edge or high-tech or anything like that, you can get some pretty good ones for

reasonable prices, new and used. So a drill press gets its name from the fact that the spinning chuck

and I'll show you how this works in a minute, is raised and lowered mechanically

Okay, so this spins, pushes down into the wood and bores a hole in the wood

Two main advantages over handheld drilling. One is precision. This is going to be drilling exactly 90 degrees

to the surface of the wood. So if you want absolute precision of

angle and depth, in fact, too, then a drill press is the thing to use

And another thing, and this doesn't really apply so much with woodworking as metalworking, but that's power

You can sit there for, you know, 15 minutes trying to drill through a piece of metal

using the right bit and cutting oil and all the rest of it, and you can do the same thing in 30 seconds

with a tool like this. But since we're talking about woodworking here, not metalworking

I've got this set up to drill a 1-inch diameter hole with this spade bit

You don't need to use spade bits alone. You can use twist bits, which I've introduced you to before

You can also use hole saws if you want to actually cut out a circle, a large circle

From a piece of wood and remove that. It's kind of just like the name says, it's a saw blade, but it's a circle and

it fits in a drill press like this. Some accessories here. They're all stuck to rare earth magnets. A very handy way of

keeping track of things. But this, for instance, here, this is a tapered plug cutter

You can only use this in a drill press, because if you try to use it freehand on a piece of wood

it's just going to dance around. It needs the firm support of a drill press shaft. But this lets you make wooden plugs that are tapered

from any wood you want for covering screw heads and things. Very useful little tool. There's lots of things you can do with this. I'll just give you a little demonstration

I was using this drill press for metal. When you're drilling metal

the bit needs to turn fairly slowly, because if it turns too fast, there'll be too much heat developed and you will ruin your drill bit. So slow for metal

faster for wood. So I've still got it set up at the speed for metal, and let's take a look at the bit

Now that is definitely spinning too slowly for a spade bit. Spade bits can make excellent holes, but they need to be spinning

faster than that. I'll just show you what it looks like. I really don't know how bad this hole is going to be, but let's just give it a try

with this. Not bad, not bad, but see, see the roughness there

We don't need to put up with that. So I'm going to bump up the speed and then I'm going to do another hole like this and show you the difference

This is how you bump up the speed. All drill presses have some kind of a transmission, I guess you could say. I'm going to unplug

the drill press because I'm going to be working at something that might chew my fingers up if it were to turn on accidentally

So we've got a series of pulleys here. This shaft and pulley is coming off the motor and

we're stepping down because we've got a small pulley spinning a large pulley. So that's speed reduction there

And then we have further speed reduction from this idler shaft, relatively small pulley, to a larger one

So we have reduction happening to here and then more reduction happening to there. And if you look here, there's a chart

that shows you the different pulley positions and the corresponding RPMs of the

revolutions per minute, or the speed of rotation of the shaft. So I'm going to

bump the speed up here. First, I'm going to take the tension off the belt. If we go down two on this and

two again here, that'll be good there. And let's actually, hang on a sec, let me just

take this right off because I need to raise this up and I can't do that when this other belt's in place

So let's go up a couple here. Let's try it here

Okay, I'm going to leave that open. Plug back in. And we'll see if we've got the kind of speed we need

Well, that's pretty fast. I think I'm going to make it a little bit faster though. There we go. Now we got the kind of speed we need

One thing about the drill press is that there's a possibility, there's always a possibility, that the bit can catch the workpiece and

throw it. And that could be a non-issue or it could be a painful issue. So I do always recommend clamping

workpieces down like this. And also, you don't just want to rely on the clamp, but the clamp certainly does help. And

let's take a look at what a faster speed will do for hole quality

There, well you can see the it's crisper. We still have some roughness there, but that's the idea

We've got the shaft spinning. We've got a work table here and

this would not be the first stationary woodworking tool I'd recommend. But depending on the style of work you do, if

you find yourself doing a lot of precision drilling, then it might make sense to buy something like this. I bought my first drill press when I was making a

block set, a children's toy block set, that involved precision holes being drilled because the blocks fit together with dowels and it had to be very precise. And

that was a project that I could only do if I had a drill press

So I went out, bought an inexpensive drill press, used it for about 10 years. It was great. Ended up giving it away

when I got this one and it works really well. So this is

something that you should consider depending on the work you're doing. Just another couple of things

This particular one has a light as you can see, which is a handy thing

It's also got a laser guidance system here so that you can tell where the bit is going to land

as well. So there's all, most drill presses don't have the illuminated light and the laser

but almost all drill presses have something like this. This is a depth stop

So let's say I wanted to drill a hole that was a bunch of holes that were this deep only and no deeper

I would drill my first hole to the depth I wanted. Then I would activate the depth stop, which in this case is this this little collar here, and it's got a

spring-loaded button on it. So it threads. See I can do fine adjustment by

turning it down. It's going down. But if I want to move quickly, because I don't really want to sit here turning it

because when I want it all the way down here, so press the button

Sidesteps the threads for a minute and then you're in position. So now

it won't go any further than that. So depth stop in action

Down below I put this cabinet here. As I said before, it's one thing to buy tools

It's another thing to keep all of the stuff organized so that you can actually make full use of the tool

So that's where this cabinet comes in. I have a lot of stuff in here. Metal working bits, wood working bits, all for boring holes

When I need to lower the platform more than it is now

I have to remove this because as you can see the table can't go down any further

There's a crank mechanism on the other side so you can raise and lower the table. In this case

this particular drill press has these big sort of locking nuts or bolts

you could call them. You loosen that and then you can tilt the table too. So that's when you want to do some

angle drilling of a precise nature. But yeah, that's the drill press

I recommend it, especially since you can get some pretty good drill presses for very little money