Saturday 29 June 2019

Pillar Drill

I've had a small pillar drill for about a year, and pretty cr@p it is too - but it was very cheap and it's a whole lot better than what I had before, which was a hand-held power drill in one of those bench stands.

This one works well enough, it has the usual stack of five pulleys and belt drive, belt tensioner, convenient power switch etc and you can set the table at an angle. But it is very flexible - the base and the table are pressed steel and the pillar is very thin - the whole thing will bend when you put any feed on.

The spindle is mounted in sealed bearings but once the quill descends it has quite a lot of play.


Here's the depth gauge and guard - this is hard plastic and broke almost the first time I used it. The depth gauge requires you to fiddle with those two nuts:


I decided to make a new mounting for the guard and depth gauge, but mostly because I want to do some boring in a big-end type arrangement (like a locomotive eccentric strap). The new mounting is made from two lengths of 10 x 30 mm aluminium bar, screwed together with two M4 screws and shaped to match the old one. Here, I am aligning the components with the lathe centre prior to drilling and boring a 40 mm hole to suit the journal on the pillar drill. The two halves of the clamp are spaced 1 mm apart, so they clamp securely to the drill:


Here it is in place, along with the broken bits of the original:


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