Browse our complete collection of benchtop drill press reviews, floor drill guides, chuck & vise setups, and maintenance tips.
You walk into a tool store or browse online and see a wall of drill presses. Ten-inch benchtops, twelve-inch variable speed models, floor-standing monsters with lasers and digital readouts. The specs blur together. You want a machine that drills s...
The motor is the heart of your drill press, and when it starts humming oddly, running slow, or refuses to start at all, everything stops. If you've been trying to figure out whether a 1/2 HP motor is right for your machine — or whether it's time t...
Here is the mistake that costs people a return shipment and a lost weekend: they find a chuck or a switch that looks exactly like the broken one, order it, and discover it does not seat, does not thread, or does not clear the casting. The part loo...
The Delta 11-980 is a benchtop press that shows up in a lot of home shops, and its chuck is a common thing to replace: worn jaws that will not grip small bits, a wobble that drills oval holes, or a chuck that drops the bit under load. A Delta dril...
The cleanest hole I ever drilled in walnut came off a Forstner bit turning slowly, and the ugliest came from a twist bit run too fast in the same board a minute earlier. Same wood, same machine, wildly different results. Drill press bits for wood ...
Losing a drill press chuck key is a rite of passage. It rolls off the table, disappears into the shop, and suddenly your Craftsman press is a paperweight until you find a replacement. The trouble is that chuck keys are not one-size-fits-all, and b...
A drill press laser is only useful if the lines actually cross where the bit goes. Out of the box, they almost never do. The good news is that aligning a crossline laser to the bit is a ten-minute job you do once, and re-check occasionally, and it...
Clausing built its presses to last, so when one starts to whine or leave rough holes, worn spindle bearings are usually the cause and a rebuild is well worth doing. Clausing drill press bearing replacement is a rewarding repair, but the checks you...
A benchtop drill press can drill metal well, despite what you sometimes hear. The limits people run into are real, but most of them come from setup and technique rather than the machine itself. A benchtop unit will not hog out huge holes in thick ...
Horsepower is the number people fixate on when they shop for a drill press, and the 1/2 HP class is where most of the confusion lives. It sits above the little 1/3 HP benchtop machines and below the 3/4 HP and 1 HP floor presses, and that middle p...
Knife making leans on a drill press harder than most woodworking does, because you are drilling hardened and stainless steels, boring clean holes for pins and handle hardware, and often using the machine for tasks like small sanding or spot work. ...
There's a logic to how drill press sizes stack. The 10-inch is the entry door—compact, light, affordable, enough for occasional work. The 15-inch floor press is where serious production happens. And sitting quietly between them is the 13-inch, a m...
