Browse our complete collection of benchtop drill press reviews, floor drill guides, chuck & vise setups, and maintenance tips.
The Craftsman 15-inch drill press is one of the more capable machines Sears sold under the Craftsman name, and it is a common find for anyone shopping the used market for a floor-standing press without floor-press money. But "Craftsman 15-inch" hi...
You are standing over a stack of curved shelf brackets that need their edges smoothed, and next to them sits a board that needs four clean, square holes. A shop fox oscillating drill press claims to handle both jobs from one base, and that promise...
The Harbor Freight 8 inch 5 speed is a small benchtop press that shows up in countless first shops, and its factory chuck is a frequent early upgrade: the keyed chuck grips unevenly, wanders on small bits, or simply wears out. Replacing it is easy...
The Delta 11-985 drill press is a small 10-inch benchtop machine that shows up often at estate sales, in old workshops, and in the hands of owners trying to figure out what they have. It was a light-duty press Delta built for homeowners, and it is...
If you have ever clamped a tall vise onto your drill-press table, fed the quill down, and watched the chuck nearly kiss the top of the jaws before the bit even touched your workpiece, you already understand the problem. A standard drill press vise...
The most useful thing taped to my drill press is not a fancy jig. It is a small card of numbers. Once the correct RPM for a given metal and bit size is a two-second glance instead of a guess, the holes come out round and the bits stop dying. A dri...
You are building a door. It is 36 inches wide, and you need a row of perfectly aligned shelf-pin holes down the center. A standard floor drill press has a fixed head. You can drill the center, but the throat depth limits how far you can reach with...
Clausing built drill presses for shops that expected machines to last decades, and many still run today. That longevity creates a specific problem: you want a better table for your Clausing, but the machine may be older than the salesperson helpin...
Picture a steel beam thirty feet in the air and a hole that has to go through it dead straight. You cannot bring the beam to a drill press, so you bring the drill press to the beam. That is the whole idea behind a magnetic drill press, and once yo...
Wood hides its speed mistakes for exactly one second, then shows them all at once: a puff of smoke around a Forstner bit, a scorched ring on maple, a fuzzy blown-out exit. Almost every one of those traces back to spindle speed. Drill press RPM for...
When someone says they need a "1/2 drill press chuck," they usually mean one of two things: a chuck with a 1/2-inch maximum capacity (the largest bit shank it will grip), or a chuck with a 1/2-inch straight-shank arbor for mounting. Those are diff...
Pulling the spindle on an Atlas Model 1010 is a bigger job than swapping a chuck, and it is where a rushed repair does real damage, bent shafts, cracked castings, ruined bearings. Removing the spindle on an Atlas drill press Model 1010 is doable i...
