Browse our complete collection of benchtop drill press reviews, floor drill guides, chuck & vise setups, and maintenance tips.
Most drill press vises hold a workpiece in one spot and leave the positioning to you and a pencil line. A Wilton cross slide drill press vise does something better: it grips the part and then lets you move it, sliding on two axes by turning handwh...
Open the classifieds in any part of the country and you will find a Craftsman 15-1/2 inch drill press for sale, usually cheap, usually described as "runs great," usually decades old. These machines were sold by the thousands through Sears, they la...
The Rockwell Compactool name carries a certain nostalgia for anyone who has spent time around vintage shop machines. It was Rockwell's line of compact, light-duty tools, and the drill presses in the range are small, simple machines that still turn...
The first time you use a sanding drum in a drill press, something clicks. Suddenly those bandsaw curves, jigsaw cutouts, and router-table sweeps that always needed an hour of rasping and file work sand smooth in minutes. A drill press running a sa...
Search for a "milling machine table for drill press" and you will find X-Y tables that bolt to your press and let you crank the work in two axes, and it is easy to conclude you have just built a poor man's milling machine. Please read this before ...
This is one of the most common workshop questions, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a flat no or a false yes. Can a drill press mill metal? It can take very light cuts in soft metal under tight conditions, and it cannot do real millin...
A benchtop drill press is a simple machine right up until a part quits. A switch stops working, a belt cracks, the quill spring loses tension and the chuck no longer springs back, and the whole thing sits idle. The good news is that most of what b...
Some drill presses are built to be bought. Others were built to be used. The Guardian Power BDM-58-12S belongs firmly in the second category — it's a vintage benchtop machine from a brand that most people under 40 have never heard of, built during...
I drilled shelf-pin holes in a cabinet side once without a fence, trusting my layout lines and a steady hand. Twenty holes later, the row wandered like a country road, and every crooked hole was on display inside that cabinet. That was the day I s...
The Delta 17-965 is a 16-1/2-inch floor drill press from Delta's long-running 17-900 family, and it is one of those machines that keeps circulating on the used market because it was built well enough to outlast its original owners. If you are look...
Column upgrade is a phrase that means two very different things depending on who is asking. Some owners want a longer or sturdier column to gain travel or reduce flex, while others use the term for adding accessories to the column they have: a rac...
A Guardian Power drill press is one of those machines that leaves owners scratching their heads, because there is no famous factory behind the name and the manuals are scarce. Here is the reality: Guardian Power Products was an import badge, the k...
