Mini Bench Drill Press

[Gregory]

16 minutes ago, Jaager said:

Is this thread limited to this particular unbranded machine?

I don't think it should be.  It's a good place to share experience and ideas about machines of comparable size.

 

It might be a good idea to limit it to these " mini " machines, and not try to compare performance to machines that are much bigger.

[Gregory]

Here is a video of a very small drilling operation.

 

 

This is a little block of boxwood.  It is very dense and hard.  

 

 Note that the slight motion you see is the the camera moving.  Looking at the spindle in relation to the background shows how stable it is.

 

[Toolmaker]

On 2/9/2024 at 7:52 PM, wefalck said:

Well, when you tighten a vice the loose jaw often has the tendency to lift or when the guides of the loose jaw have too much play, the jaw can move sideways when tightened. Both the fixed and loose jaw should also close tight and precisely when tightened without a workpiece in it. Finally, the edge of the fixed jaw should be precisely aligned with the body of the vice, so that you can align it easily on the mill table.

 

The mentioned toolmaker's vices don't have a spindle to tighten the loose jaw, but the jaw is pulled down- and forward by a screw that screws into a sort of 'toggle' underneath the vice. This make the vice also a lot shorter, as there is no spindle sticking out.

 

Here is a picture of such vice (in my shop-made tilting device:

The Sherline vice operates in the way you describe wefalck. This is a link to it for sale in the USA.

 

https://www.sherline.com/product/3551-milling-vise/#description

 

Edited February 19 by Toolmaker

[Gregory]

It's really hard to see the vise in your image and how it might integrate with the drill press we are discussing.

[Roger Pellett]

Here’s a photo of the Sherline vise.  Note, The socket headed cap screw that tightens the vice pulls down as well as in.

 

[wefalck]

What I like about my toolmaker's vice shown earlier is that it has two rabbets in the jaws that allow you to clamp shorter parts without the need of parallels.

 

Talking about parallels to prop up shorter material in a vice: I often use pieces of drill-rod instead - it's a lot cheaper than sets of parallels.

[Roger Pellett]

The company that I worked for had a metallurgy lab for testing the effect of different hot bend temperatures and subsequent heat treat cycles on pipeline steels.  A key requirement was impact strength.  Charpy impact specimens make good lathe parallels as they were surface ground to close tolerances.  There was always a bucket of unbroken specimens left over from testing a particular heat that were scrap.

 

Roger