Please enlighten me on the topic of Drill Presses

For my birthday, my FIL gave me a Central Machine (harbor freight) drill press

I know you put the pointy bit in the spinny thing, and turn the handle-a-mabob down to make a hole in something...actually, I know a little bit more than that. I know you use slower chuck RPMs for harder materials, and that you can purchase specialty vices for holding the work and making precise cuts. Ive even heard you can do very light, non-precision critical milling operations with the right tooling. Who can point me in a good direction for learning about the tooling - vices, chucks, bits etc, and about the operation of such tools?

I know asking a forum to "learn me about maching" is like asking a doctor to "learn me about coronary bypassing" via email, so Im just looking for a nudge in the right direction. Im sure there are forums out there for machinists who dont flame new people into noob-B-ques, what are they? Where can the average Joe go to get bits and vices?

Im pretty excited to get this new tool. I want to start using it for some projects I have in mind and am excited to start making chips.

Sticking with HF

This at a minimum:

This is what I want:

If you've never used a drill press, it's amazing how hard a piece of 2x4 will hit your hand at 1500rpm

In reply to Grtechguy:

I'm in agreement with Grtechguy on both accounts.

And a bit of safety advice: After using your drill press for a while, you will lose the key for the chuck. You will have an incline to chain it to the drill press so it hangs from it and you'll always know where it is. DO NOT DO THIS! I've seen a guy at work get sloppy. He had the key still in the chuck with his hand on the key and with his other hand turn on the drill. The chain wrapped around the chuck with his hand in between. It mangled his hand. Don't do that.

I saw that! Chuck key hanging from the chuck on a chain, girl turns the spindle on; chain winds around chuck, key gets wound up and then fires off at light speed.

The supervisor of the Apprentice Shop bent over a table to get a look at something and the chuck key whizzed over his back and stuck into the concrete wall.

He stood up, blinked a few times, went home.

And buy safety glasses!

Dan

my key is on a big magnet on the side of the press

This makes for a nice upgrade if you never spin big bits (which you won't on that)

Grtechguy wrote: This is what I want:

I have that one - it was on-sale with coupon for $45. It is sloppy, too tall, shavings easily jam the threads so you have to clean it really well even between holes for the same piece but still - for the price it has proven very useful.

question(s):

How do I know what taper I have on my spindle?
Is it possible to mount a 3 jaw lathe chuck on the same spindle?
How do Ichange chucks? just pry it off the spindle with a ball joint fork? (kidding...sort of)

Grtechguy wrote: my key is on a big magnet on the side of the press

genius...I have some hard drive magnets just laying around that would be great for this

4cylndrfury wrote: question(s): How do I know what taper I have on my spindle? Is it possible to mount a 3 jaw lathe chuck on the same spindle? How do Ichange chucks? just pry it off the spindle with a ball joint fork? (kidding...sort of)

1. check the manual
2. why? get a 5/8" or 3/4" chuck
3. If it is tapered (some screw on) , pull the quill all the way down. there will be a slot to insert a "wedge" to removed the chuck. it's a pressure

this is the "wedge"

The HF milling vice isn't very good for milling. It is pretty good for getting your piece right where you want it to be though. I did a lot of adjusting to mine to get rid of the slop but its still sloppy

Grtechguy wrote: This at a minimum:

I bought one for a project and it really made a difference! I would also recommend getting your drill bits from anywhere other than Harbor Freight. The cost of the drill bits that I bought from Grainger was scary, but one bit drilled through 3/8" thick about 100 times and still looked new. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.

Grtechguy wrote:

4cylndrfury wrote: question(s): How do I know what taper I have on my spindle? Is it possible to mount a 3 jaw lathe chuck on the same spindle? How do Ichange chucks? just pry it off the spindle with a ball joint fork? (kidding...sort of)

1. check the manual 2. why? get a 5/8" or 3/4" chuck 3. If it is tapered (some screw on) , pull the quill all the way down. there will be a slot to insert a "wedge" to removed the chuck. it's a pressure this is the "wedge"

The "Wedge" is called a drift. The tapered shaft assures the spindle is centered. The taper is a Morse taper (usually).

Larger presses (doesn't mean yours doesn't) have a threaded rod that comes in from the top. It threads into the top of the chuck and tightens the chuck up into the female taper.

Look at the top photo: You see the outside of the drill press column and the hole where the drift goes into. You'll see three distinct pieces in there. The center one is an adaptor that allows a #3 taper to fit inside a #5 spindle.

Dan

This may help with adaptor I.D.

http://www.newmantools.com/tech/taper.htm

I have a drill vise like pictured but it's a RECORD brand. I looked at the adjustable vices at Princess Auto and wasn't impressed (shocking, right?). Sadly, the drill press I was using was stolen in a garage break-in.

Look for a cheap set of t-bolts/nuts and beam clamps to supplement holding down your work and maybe a set of parallels so you don't start drilling into the table top or vice (unless you don't care).

A friend told me about this place while talking about my dream of owning some machining equipment (he's got a small hobby lathe and vertical mill).

http://www.shars.com/

It's like HF but with a greater selection of cheap accessories

Thanks Dan, couldn't remember the term "Drift".

4cylndrfury wrote:

Grtechguy wrote: my key is on a big magnet on the side of the press

genius...I have some hard drive magnets just laying around that would be great for this

I thought I was a genius for sticking my chuck to the side of the press with a magnet until I set it on the bench for a second and it collected all the metal filings from all the E36 M3 I just drilled. Disregard if all you do is non-ferrous hole-making.

Good drills are so much better than cheap drills that they're barely recognizable as the same tools. Really. The downer is that any of the several drill indexes in my shop cost more than the 15" Craftsman floor mount drill press.

Here's a basic 1/16"-1/2" set of USA made Hertel drills on sale...

Included in the contents of a machine shop I acquired last year was a set of "screw machine length" plain high speed steel drills. USA made, no funny tip geometry. I thought "wow - with the money these people squandered on tooling, why not buy 135 degree, split point cobalt drills?"...

Until I started using them. Unless you need to drill deep holes - and drilling deep ~accurate~ holes is very difficult - screw machine length drills will start without wandering without having to centerpunch the location, and they produce a hole that is closer to the actual drill diameter.

So I'm a convert now.

And for speed, it's based on the material and to a great degree the drill diameter to achieve the correct surface feet/minute and chip load. Drilling most stainless steels, if you don't maintain adequate feed, the surface you're trying to drill work hardens nearly instantly, and within seconds you have a smoking, blue drill. Maintain proper feed and the drill chew through.

For many operations "pecking" is necessary to allow the chips to clear - when the flutes pack with chips and lubricant and the new chips have nowhere to go, the drill can fuse to the bore with surprising rapidity.

Cutting fluids: For aluminum, WD40 is great. It's a miserable lubricant, and I don't let stuff get wet and need to displace moisture - but for turning, milling and drilling aluminum I use it all the time. For stainless I use Tap Magic or Moly Dee for drilling and tapping, mild steel I use the smelly black sulphurized oil you can get at Home Despot.

Useful basic speed and feed calculator

The process of doing machine work is slow and deliberate. Until you develop a working vocabulary of speeds and feeds through experience, stopping to look up the correct parameters for the drilling/milling/turning/boring operation is a necessity, and will save time in the long run.

As a machinist for 30 odd years I've seen (and done) a lot bad things happen around machine tools. First always wear safety glasses when making chips and never wear gloves around rotating machinery. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS make sure the chuck key is out of the chuck before starting the machine. They have safety chuck keys that have a plunger in them so when your not actually hold the key in to change bits the key pops out (I hate them but they work). Always make sure the obect you are drilling is properly secured in a vice or clamped to the table. I've seen vises thrown across the shop because they weren't clamped down. I saw a person get their hand and arm cut to shreads when a drill hung up in a piece of sheet metal and started spinning it

The one biggest mistake I see people make with a drill of any type is spinning it too fast. In 99.9% of the time slower is better. Use oil or some type of cutting fluid. Generally if your getting smoke your generating too much heat, slow it down. Your tools will thank you for it.

Trying to put a lathe chuck on a drill press is very bad idea on so many levels. Your asking the machine to do something it wasn't designed for, chuck is too heavy, too much centrifical (how ever you spell it) force etc, etc etc. You'd be asking to get hurt or destry something. Put nothing in the spindle that wasn't desined to be there.

When it comes to tooling, like was mentioned before, you get what you pay for. You'll find very often that the tooling needed to operate a machine is more expensive than the machine tool itself. Buy drill bits that are at least made of High Speed Steel (HSS), carbon steel drills are a waste of money. If you find you are using just a few sizes very often or are regularly drilling harder materials look into cobalt (CO) drills.

Sorry for the long lecture

The column clamp and table swivel of that HF drill press are gonna flex big time. Stick to drilling, that's what it's designed for.

someday you can upgrade:

ThePhranc wrote: The HF milling vice isn't very good for milling. It is pretty good for getting your piece right where you want it to be though. I did a lot of adjusting to mine to get rid of the slop but its still sloppy

Agreed!

I have both HF vices and the "milling" vise is only good enough for getting the spot you want to drill on your piece lined up with the drill bit. Also have some type of "C" clamps or large vice grips to hold larger items.

Clamp clamp clamp! It's amazing how quickly the work piece starts spinning if you don't have it secured, and it's also amazing how hard it is to get out of the way or to get the drill stopped. Fortunately I learned that lesson with something that was pretty blunt. If it had been sheet metal I would be typing with a pencil held in my mouth.

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote:

4cylndrfury wrote:

Grtechguy wrote: my key is on a big magnet on the side of the press

genius...I have some hard drive magnets just laying around that would be great for this

I thought I was a genius for sticking my chuck to the side of the press with a magnet until I set it on the bench for a second and it collected all the metal filings from all the E36 M3 I just drilled. Disregard if all you do is non-ferrous hole-making.

when I worked at the bike shop, we often had to deburr and ream bearing surfaces in steel bike frames, which left a lot of shavings around...steel shavings and inner tubes dont mix well. One day, the owner bought an obscene quantity of condoms for the shop: Place a large, powerful magnet inside a condom, wave condomey magnet over the work area to pick up shavings, turn inside out to remove magnet, tie off the condom keeping the metal bits inside, throw away. Kinda weird, but works great

thanks for all the feedback everybody, I do appreciate it, and PPE is high up on my list of important things for the garage, so no worries there. Thanks for the tip about no gloves, makes perfect sense.

I just want to ask one question - as I was going through the setup procedure, following the manual, it just says to place the chuck onto the spindle, and press down on a piece of wood. It looks like theres a small groove cut on the spindle just a fraction of a mm below the bearing, but theres no way that I am getting the chuck all the way up there without a hydraulic press and a miracle. Does the chuck really just press on to the spindle or is there some kind of detent or clip or something? seems to me that it wouldnt take too much in the way of vibration or just plain torque to get it to come loose. Did I get the wrong chuck packaged up in my box? I can take some pics if it helps.