METAL DRILLING MADE EASY: See How a Car Jack Helps Big-Time

UPDATED 21Aug2020 + video: If you ever have to drill holes in the underside of a vehicle frame, you know how hard it is to get the job done with only a hand drill. But what else can you use under there when you’re installing a trailer hitch or doing a frame repair? The video below shows how to use a scissor jack from the car to turn your hand-drill into something of a drill press. Click to watch. You’ll find a transcript below the video window in case you want to review the details. This approach really works, as you’ll see.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: 00:10 One of the recurring challenges of driveway mechanics like me – and maybe you – is that sometimes you have to drill metal in awkward places with a hand drill. The problem, as I’m going to show you here, is that it’s really tiring. It’s hard to put enough pressure on a drill to get it to drill out old bolts and things like that, just with your arm. This is not on a drill press. So, I’ve got a trick that helps with that, so let’s go underneath the Echo here and I’ll show you what I find works really well. So, if you look under here you’ll see the remnants of two bolts. They used to hold a lug on here, and for reasons I don’t need to explain, I need to drill these out and tap them for fresh bolts. So the problem is getting that drilling done properly and it’s really hard on the arm and progress is slow (virtually non-existent) so that’s where I’m using this jack.

01:21 This is the actual scissor jack from the car, and I like it because it can go down really low. But it can also extend up pretty high so I’m using this jack to put pressure on the drill and it just makes all the difference in the world. I can go up here, squirt on a little cutting oil and now it’s kind of like a drill press. I just put some pressure it. It’s actually enough to raise the car a bit and then I hold it steady and you can just see how it … The shavings are just flying off there just as if I was drilling this in a drill press. Much faster, much better and much easier on the arm, so remember the scissor jack when you gotta do a dirty drilling job like this.

02:16 So, I’ve completed my job now and I’ve done a lot of metal drilling. As you saw, it was pretty heavy drilling. I started with the step bit that you saw in the first part of the video and then I switched over to a 5/16th bit, which is the size of the hole you need for a 3/8th bolt. There wer two holes like that. There was other drilling involved in the job too. So, I started with this fresh battery and take a look at this. After all that work, can you see the red lights there? It doesn’t even show that I’ve used any. The capacity of the top lithium ion batteries these days is amazing. This is a 9 amp hour unit. Milwaukee’s actually got them in 12 now, 12 amp hour. So, I continue to be amazing at the amount of power that are in these cordless tool batteries and this is kind of a prime example of that.