Sadly it looks like only the D13 is at £99. The D19 is £326.

Mike

I purchased a 'cheap' benchtop drill from Lidl's a year or so back. Once home I assembled it and turned it on – quite apart from the terrible noise it made, the quill (when extended) could be pulled side to side by about 3mm – completely useless for my needs. It went straight back to the store and they refunded my money (with no hassle at all). I've wandered through various DIY sheds since and tried the quills on any small (e.g. cheap) drill presses I've seen and all of them had a lot of quill 'slop'.

Maybe the (cheaper) Chester drill is better but I suspect that they all probably come from the same factory. Depends on what you expect from your benchtop drill but if you want something that will drill small holes reasonably accurately in metal, then I think you will probably need to pay a bit more than the typical £80-90 small drill price for something good.

Regards,

IanT

If it was me, I would avoid anything that mentioned wood or DIY in the write up.

Weighed less than 100lbs or it might be a bit bendy.

A low speed of more than 300ish rpm for that 1/2" drill.

I would be looking at second hand Meddings, Pollard or Fobco or similar on EBay. I bought Fobco for £200 and it was in excellent condition

colin

Can't disagree with that, and my cheap pillar drill doesn't get much use now I have a milling machine. But I wouldn't write off cheap pillar and bench drills quite so quickly because they're better than a hand-drill plus there's a technique that improves accuracy.

First, an accurately placed centre pop in the job is needed. With that as guide, a twist drill will align acceptably into the pop provided the operator allows the job to float into the drill's spinning axis. The trick is in taking a floppy approach rather than clamping everything down rigidly and expecting a bearing to keep the drill straight.

Important to hold the work so it can only move only sideways. The job still needs to be held in a machine vice with bolts tight enough to stop the whole lot taking off if the drill grabs.

However, I prefer my milling machine for accurate drilling – it requires less skill, is safer, and faster.

Dave

In the same vein, you could turn up a close-fitting bush and screw it to the underside of the head casting to stabilise the quill.

Trouble is, for some reason you expect the higher priced machines from the commercial importers to be better than the budget version of their ranges that we all have in the garage to do menial work. Having looked to upgrade for over a year at various machines in the £200 to £300 category, I came to the conclusion paying more only gets you a bigger drill, not a better one.

They are without fail characterised by any or all of the following; wobbly quills, off centre spindles or chucks, flexible columns the thickness of a baked bean can, inadequate mounting hardware, rough actions etc etc. And yes, you could probably remediate the deficiencies to some degree, but WTF – for some crazy reason I expect the product to work properly out of the box without requiring a full rebuild, at least for the first week. Sheesh! how hard can it be to get a good quill fit with todays manufacturing processes?

In the main, the current crop of general purpose far east drill machines are all of the same fundamentally bad design, badly implemented, but no doubt very cheap to produce and profitable for the manufacturers.

You then turn to the recycled brit-tool market and quietly despair at the collection of knackered old dogs on offer, but at least you go into that market fully expecting to carry out a rebuild. Be prepared to be aghast at the prices those dog eared specimens attract. I suppose if you can source or make the spares required you would end up with something worthwhile eventually, but it hardly seems worth the cost in blood and treasure.

nb. This is where someone usually chimes in about how they found a pile of unused Awesome Specials (or what ever) for a fiver each outside the local tech. Well good for you, but that doesn't help rest of us that have to keep vainly searching.

Try one of these, I don't think any of those criticisms apply to mine.

http://www.machinemart.co.uk/p/clarke-cdp302b-bench-drill-press-230v/

Available from Thursday 13 Feb At Lidl Bench Pillar Drill £ 59.99 Looks good Info sounds O/K May have look if there . No I am not selling it . Any body in need may be worth a Look?

Brian Morehen