Drilling 500 holes in mild steel

I sent a message to this company. Looks interesting.

I don't have a place to grab hold of the blade, but your dead man made me think of a real small drill press and a couple of magnetic bases like used for dial indicators. I wonder if I could get enough strength from a couple of those? The drill press would have to be about the size of a large cordless drill with a base plate about 6" square maximum that the magnetic bases would be mounted on. Anybody have a specific product that would complete this idea?

Well there are permanent magnets out there strong enough. However you'd need such a strong magnet that it would be almost impossible to move it. Figure a minimum of a 1000 lb pull magnet to do any real good.

What you really need is a the right magnetic drill. From the sounds of it the ones you called about are made for annular cutters. There are models out there that just have a drill chuck. This is the one you want.

They make an adapter for a standard drill motor that holds it like a drill press. It's small enough you may be able to clamp it to your work with C clamps.

This is a definite mag drill job. Check out the Milwaukee line, but for what you are doing you could get by just fine with a smaller Jancy mag drill- I have a Jancy JM 101, and it is plenty to do this job, but 10 to 20 pounds lighter than a big milwaukee, and after a couple hundred holes, you are gonna be mighty happy about that. Plus you save 500 bucks or so.

buy the drill chuck as an accessory- we routinely use our chuck to drill holes to tap 10/24, so it will handle a bit the size you want no problem.

I borrowed a Jancy like that for a job that required crawling around inside a big hydraulic press and putting holes in some awkward spots. It was much easier than hauling around a 60# monster. One thing it doesn't have is a fine adjustment for tweaking position after the magnet is turned on.

Ned Simmons