I made a pivoting type manual drill press. The drill motor is
fixed to the end of 500 mm long arm which pivots at its end by
two thrust bearings (from an old car clutch) that sandwich the
50x50mm (3 mm wall) square aluminium arm. The difficult part is
mounting the motor to the end of the arm, because you want it
adjustable for alignment of the vertical feed and get it
perfectly parallel. If anyone is interested I will get some
photos and make them available online.
The advantage of this technique is almost zero side to side play
without the need of precision linear bearings. You can safely use
0.45mm carbide drill bits, the smallest size drill I own.
The disadvantage is the extra bench space required for the long
arm, which is fixed to a large heavy base like a slab of 18 mm
MDF particle board. I usually have the habit of over engineering
my home brew stuff and probably could of made it half the size.
Adam
Stefan Trethan wrote:
> i thought of manual drill press, moving the pcb with your hand.
>
> i know there are such devices sold especially for this task and they are qite expensive.
> but i'm sure it is possible to get a drill press working properly without these special bearings.
> if you limit the minimum diameter to 0,8 or 0,6 millimeter.
>
>
> i was wondering how the guys here do the drilling which don't hava a x/y drill cnc machine.
>
> regards
> stefan
>