Browse our complete collection of benchtop drill press reviews, floor drill guides, chuck & vise setups, and maintenance tips.
Gunsmithing asks more of a drill press than general shop work does. The holes are small, the tolerances are tight, and the material is often hardened steel that punishes any wobble or heat. A light benchtop machine can drill a bracket, but it will...
The box shows up heavier than you expected, a slab of cast iron in pieces, and now you are on the garage floor with an Allen wrench trying to figure out which of the five belt grooves gives you the right speed for a Forstner bit. If you own or are...
Sooner or later a repair sends you after the spindle pulley: a cracked pulley to replace, worn spindle bearings to reach, or a seized pulley that has to come off before anything else can happen. Drill press spindle pulley removal sounds simple, an...
Stand in front of a drill press for the first time and it can look intimidating: a tall column, a heavy head, a wheel on the side, levers, a table that cranks up and down. It is actually one of the simplest machines in the shop once someone explai...
Search this phrase and you will find plenty of videos of people cutting slots on a drill press. What you will not always hear is the part where the spindle flexes, the end mill grabs, and the workpiece jumps. Milling on a drill press sits in an aw...
Stand next to a gear-head drill press cutting a one-inch hole through steel plate and you feel why serious shops buy them. There is no belt slipping, no bogging down, just a steady grind as the geared spindle delivers torque the way a car's low ge...
Somewhere online, someone is milling an aluminum bracket on a drill press and it looks like it works. What the video does not show is the end mill slowly pulling out of the drill chuck, the spindle bearings taking a beating they were never designe...
Wood is the usual material for a shop-built drill press stand, but steel has real advantages: it is stiffer for its size, adds useful mass down low, and shrugs off the vibration and load of heavier drilling. A welded metal stand can be more rigid ...
WEN has quietly become the default brand for home-shop drill presses, and the reason is simple: the company covers nearly every benchtop size and feature level a woodworker might want, at a value that keeps it near the top of every recommendation ...
A Jacobs chuck on a drill press is held in place by a Jacobs Taper — a precision self-holding taper ground to close tolerances that creates friction grip when the chuck is seated. Understanding what a Jacobs Taper is, why it holds, and what releas...
The cast table on an old Craftsman press takes a beating. Years of drilling leave the surface pocked, the center hole wallowed out, and sometimes a corner cracked from a fall. When that happens you face a fork in the road: hunt down an original ca...
The question comes up in every home shop eventually. You need to cut a slot, square a corner, or clean up an edge, and the only machine on hand is a drill press. Can it do the job of a mill? The step-by-step answer below will get you through one l...
