[sdiy] Drill Press Recommendations?

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Wednesday 17 September 2008 20:28, Tom Arnold wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 07:56:52PM -0400, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
> > > When I bought my mill ( a Sieg X2 ) I looked at both the Grizzly and HF
> > > version.  Grizzly ones are cleaned better and have a few minor
> > > differences on what parts are installed, different wheels and diffent
> > > taper ( MT vs R8 ).
> >
> > I haven't decided yet whether I want to go with one or the other of
> > those, but it's moot for now anyhow,  that purchase,  if I do go there at
> > all,  is quite a ways off.  A place to put it would be good.  :-)
>
> I cannot stress how much fun it has been to have a small mill.  Sure, it
> makes me want a BIG mill but it also lets me do things that would have
> taken real time before, like cutting square holes in things, slots of slide
> pots, replacement bits for broken joysticks... its an incredably handy tool
> to have.

Yup!

I'm probably going to homebrew something first.  My interest in this stuff 
started because of the fact that while looking for something else (ain't that 
always the way?  :-) I started to see uses for stepper motors,  and having a 
whole box of them that I've salvaged from various things,  I thought it might 
be nifty to put them to some kind of use.  My initial goal is to be able to 
come up with something having maybe a square foot or so of work area that'll 
allow me to mehcanically etch boards,  and to drill them.  Once I get that 
going maybe I'll think about going further.

> I'm even using it for a lot of simple drilling just because having a large
> table with a useful clamp surface ( relative to the same size drill press )
> is REALLY handy, and the tooling I got from littlemachineshop.com was quite
> reasonably priced and is holding up much better then I expected.

Yeah,  and then once you can do things under software control stuff that was 
either real tedious or not all that possible before becomes a whole lot 
easier.

> I haven't anything yet that I couldnt have done manually, but I've done
> several things I wouldnt have -attempted- manually.

Just so.  :-)

I've been kicking these ideas around for at least a couple of years now,  and 
haven't even started building something yet,  don't have the design nailed 
down yet,  but I figure I'm learning a bunch of stuff along the way and have 
some ideas of what I want fairly well nailed down,  anyhow.

Maybe one of these days I'll get to the point where I actually start working 
on it.  We'll see.


-- 
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James 
M Dakin