Sensitive drill press

Yes, also machines with separate motors, but your whereabouts may determine which makes may be available.

Tom

I have an old 1/4" Jones and Shipman sensitive bench drill that's been converted to single phase. Uses an ordinary foot mounted motor. A point that I would raise is that a lot of the commercially built sensitive drills - AREN'T!!! My little J&S (and a pretty similar Meddings that we had at work) uses a rack and pinion feed for the quill just like a conventional bench drill. Not really sensitive enough for the really fine stuff, for which a lever action feed would be better. Probably the best advice I could offer is to consider building a George H. Thomas universal pillar tool, as covered in his "Workshop Techniques" book. The kit is available from Hemmingway, here:

Cheers, Scruff.

Its like the old saying, its not what you have but how you use it,

have 2 drills side by side, one is high speed, one is low speed, bot are eastern imports, i have drilled .5mm with the high speed free han with no problems and the other takes care up to 1/2inch dia, Dav

-- DCree

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--Here's a link to the one I've got:

--Nice company, good people, good product.

A three phase motor on a small drill is not automatically to be rejected. Check that the motor is marked 240/440 volt. It should have six terminals under a cover plate. Wire this as delta mode 240 volt. connect two of the terminals to 240 live and neutral and an 400vAC rated capacitor between the third terminal and one of the others. The value of the capcitor should be about 40mfd/hp of the motor. You possibly have to spin the chuck to start the motor but it should run OK.

hth

Bob

There is a guy on youtube who shows his small drill, it looks a real

useful tool, Dav

-- DCree

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--Here's a link to a photo of a widget I made, to get more sensitive feel when using a milling machine to drill tiny holes. Something like it would work equally well on a drillpress.

Steamer, I'd forgotten about that sort of attachment. There are plans on chris Heapy's site (archived here:

for a similar one. It's a few items down on the workshop projects page. It's a pretty handy looking thing. Hopefully I'll get round to making one eventually. Cheers, Scruff.

In article , steamer writes

Myford sell a similar one for use in the tailstock of the 7 series lathes.

David

Handy. What method did you use to provide the rotational drive to the chuck as it slides up and down, please?

Dave

--Ah. It's store-bought and modified. I think it's just referred to as a "sensitive drill attachment" or some such. It consists of a Jacobs #0 chuck on a stem that slides inside a 1/2" rod. It's got a spring to retract it and the back of the chuck has a bearing with a ring pressed onto it. To operate the ring can be grabbed and used to push the chuck down into the work. My widget fastens onto this ring, then provides a lever a little farther away. Will check the big catalog and get back with a part number.

--Yeah, found 'em in a couple of catalogs. Travers Tool has something called "Accu-Driller" 'sensitive hand drill' and they sell them for as little as $54.60, but one with a decent chuck costs about twice that. Their part number for this one is 63-003-205. In the Rutland catalog it "Hand drill feed with chuck", model# 5000 2200 for $115.11 Hope that helps!

Thanks. I'll have a look at those.

Dave