Five Great Reasons For Having A Drill Press In Your Shop

Do you drill holes? Ever try to accurately do it by hand?

Most of the time a single hole being drilled can be done by hand with fairly good results. Doing more than one can be a challenge however. With a drill press you can do these all day long producing same size, round (not oblong which at times you may get with a hand drill) and equal depths. A good great reason for a drill press.

Do you tap the holes that you drilled?

Tapping holes are a necessity and can be difficult by hand when you have many to do. How convenient would it be to run the tap into pre-drilled hole and with a flip of a switch extract it time after time? A drill press can do that.  

Have you ever used your hand drill to evenly make swirl or engine-turned pattern on your material?

If you’re a gear head building your dream car and want to do a little swirl mark job to your dash panel, what’s the best way to do it on a budget? Drill press! Using a brush or abrasive wheel you can duplicate the swirl pattern over your entire panel surface. Great way to customize or hide finger prints and scratches on whatever panel you need. Below is the swirl pattern done with our drill press on TV’s Stacey David’s power hammer.

Pattern created with our drill press on
Stacey David' power hammer

Ever lock up the drill bit and twist around your wrists to angles you never knew you could?

I know I’ve this more than once. Drilling along when either the part moves or the bit just plain locks-up spinning the drill in ways that you wish it wouldn’t. Solution: clamp the part into a vise on a nice firm drill press table, set your speed and run down the hand wheel giving you the hole you need without endangering yourself, others, or the part.

Ever ground down the drill bit shaft so you can “exceed” the hand drills capacity?

Most of us have done this; the art of drill manipulation. The half-inch drill bit not fitting in the 3/8” drill chuck. Turn it down. Exceed the drills capacity. Not a good idea. Get a drill press with the capacity you need and do not try to “make it fit.” Our drill presses come with either a MT 2, MT 3, or MT 4 giving you bigger capacities without modifying the drill bits. If you have smaller straight bits, then just insert the chuck for those. No cobbling, no effort, just the right way of doing things.

Dake offers a wide range of drill presses from belt drive tabletops to floor model power down feed and variable speed models, so the hardest part of using a drill press may just be choosing which model you want.

How many good great reasons do you need?