Browse our complete collection of benchtop drill press reviews, floor drill guides, chuck & vise setups, and maintenance tips.
Somebody left a Craftsman drill press in my garage when I bought my house. Model number on the back: 113.213151. No manual, no belt chart, no nothing — just a machine that ran and a complete mystery about how to set it up right.
Ask this question in any woodworking forum and you get a pile-up of contradictory replies: "works great," "ruined my quill," "just buy a mortiser." They are all describing the same tool used in different ways. The capability is real, the limits ar...
"Measure the drill press" sounds like one job, but people mean very different things by it: the swing that names the machine's size, the chuck capacity, the arbor taper for a replacement chuck, the belt length, the vise jaws, the runout, or the sp...
"Best for the money" is a different question from "cheapest" and from "best," and it is usually the smartest one to ask. It means the machine that delivers the most capability for what you pay, the one that punches above its class, giving you fund...
Variable speed is the feature that changes how a drill press feels to use. Instead of stopping to move a belt between pulleys every time you switch from a large bit to a small one, you turn a dial and the machine changes RPM while it runs. WEN has...
A leaning hole is one of those defects that hides until it matters. The table looked flat, the bit looked straight, and yet the dowel goes in cocked or the two mating parts do not line up. Nine times out of ten the culprit is a table that is not s...
You need to drill a pattern of holes in a workpiece with exact spacing, and a standard vise or clamp setup is too slow and too imprecise. A cross slide table or vise lets you move the workpiece in the X and Y axes with calibrated knobs, giving you...
You chuck a straight bit, flick the switch, and the tip draws a little circle in the air instead of a clean point. Your holes come out fat, slightly oval, or off your layout mark. That wobble has a name: runout. Before you blame the machine and st...
Many Delta drill presses top out their low end around 250 to 300 revolutions per minute, which is fine for wood and small bits but still too fast for a large hole saw in steel. So owners start hunting for a Delta drill press slow speed attachment,...
A drill press is built to drill straight down, so the first time you need a hole at forty-five degrees, the machine seems to be working against you. It is not. There are two clean ways to tilt the work relative to the bit, and once you know them, ...
"Heavy duty" is one of those phrases stamped on everything from real industrial iron to lightweight machines hoping to sound tougher than they are. When it comes to a drill press, the label alone means nothing; what makes a machine genuinely heavy...
A benchtop drill press does its best work at the wrong height on a surface that may flex, and a floor stand fixes both. But a stand is not just a shelf with legs; it is part of the machine's accuracy chain, because any movement or flex under drill...
