Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap 5. The Drill

It's true that you can buy a small drill press for a moderate price, but that would deprive you of the fun of building one, and you would not gain the skill and know­ledge that will be developed by these exercises. If you have followed the series in sequence, and com­pleted the lathe, the shaper and the miller, you will have done considerable drilling with your electric hand drill. This is tedious work, and frustrating too, for it takes practice to produce a hole that is in line and on center with a hand drill. No doubt your desire to own a drill press is much greater than when you began. The patterns and castings for the drill press are not difficult if you have the back ground of the earlier pro­jects, so we'll spend more time discussing machining oper­ations than we will on foundry. When I began, I expected to make considerable use of both the milling machine and the shaper to machine the castings, but the home made lathe with its 7" swing was easily capable of doing all of the work except milling the keyway in the spindle. It would appear that the drill press could have been presented earlier in the series because it has such a sim­ple appearance, but there are some exacting requirements in the machining operations that I feel would have dis­couraged many. We are still working with simple accessories, and the project is additional proof of the worth of a simple lathe equipped with no more than a face plate and centers. The drill press will be a vital neccessity for building the deluxe accessories though, and so will the additional skill and knowledge that you will acquire wlth this project, The design exceeds the needs of most home shop opera­tions, for it will drill a 5/8" hole in steel with ease. It can be scaled down to a smaller size easily, or you can scale it up to a hefty floor model if you want to, Keep in mind that some of the parts use the extreme capacity of the lathe though, so you will have to depend on the larger swing of the miller or a larger lathe if you scale up. The drill press is likely to be the greatest challenge yet. It will certainly be the most used machine in the shop, and you will be a far better machinist and mechanic when you have built it,