# Making A Chinese Drill Press Not Suck So Bad?



## Twmaster

I've got one of those ubiquitous Chinese 5 speed benchtop drill presses. While I have not taken the head apart yet I was curious if any of you fine modeler folks gone about a rebuild of one of these drills? The aim is to improve (or remove) the loads of spindle run out.

Yes, I know it may be better to go and buy a good drill press. However I like to tinker. So if I can improve what I already have for little more than an investment in time I see that as a win.


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## Powder keg

If it fits..... We could shoot it out of my bowling ball cannon) 

Mine has the same trouble.


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## Deanofid

Here's a "me too". Same kind of drill press, I'll bet. Small five speed bench top thing. This one has serious spindle runout, and has had it since the day I got it NEW. It wobbles all over the place. If I'm worried about the hole being drilled, it gets done on the Taig mill, but that isn't very convenient.

Haven't looked at the spindle. I don't know it's too small for the bearing ID, or if the bearing OD is to small for the head casting. 
Don't really know what to do about it but make a new spindle. Quite a project.

Dean


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## rake60

It may not be a spindle run out condition.
I have a "Tradesman" bench drill press. (Good luck looking that up! :)
I bought it at Lowe's for less than $150. It too had a considerable run out
when a piece of drill rod was chucked up and checked with an indicator.
.017" run out to be exact. It ended up being a cheap chuck on my cheap
drill press. I replaced the chuck with a *"good"* one. I paid all of $19USD for it. 
Now the drill rod runs out .005" when checked with an indicator. 
That's not bad for a drill press!
They were never intended to be a precision machine.

You can spend a lot of money and buy one that will be tighter and more accurate.
I use mine for poking rough holes in materials. It saves a little wear on my mini mill.
If it is a need to be accurate operation, the mini mill will have to do it.

Rick


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## Twmaster

I easily have 50-60 thou runout.

I would not be shocked if the chuck was bad. I guess I'll need to knock it off (some sort of taper) and see about runout at the end of the spindle. Then maybe find a replacement taper seat chuck. I'll do that before I try to fix something till it's broke.


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## rake60

Now *THAT* is run out!

I'd be taking that back to the point of purchase to exchange it.

Rick


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## Twmaster

I wish it was that easy. I've had this for years.


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## pete

Twmaster,
This won't help a whole lot if you can't find the artical but Model Engineer magazine had an artical in it about 8-12 yrs. ago about rebuilding a small cheap drill press, If I remember correctly they rebored the head for larger/better bearings, ect,ect. The guy ended up with a pretty accurate drill press in the end. All my magazines are in storage or I'd dig the magazine out and scan it for you, Maybe this rings a bell for someone here with a collection of these magazines.

If it were me I'd pull your drill press apart and set up the spindle on some V blocks or between centers on your lathe and check it out with a dial indicator. With .050-.060 run out it would be impossible to make it worse. If the spindle checks out then new bearings, New chuck will fix it. With the run out you have, Your drill press is pretty well useless as it is.

Pete


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## rleete

Friend recently bought one. Runout was so bad as to be visible without using any indicator. I'd say it was easily .100, if not more. Completely unusable as it was.

Disassembled. No obvious defects or bent parts. Removed chuck from spindle, and found a burr on the chuck was preventing seating correctly, and had scored the taper badly. A few minutes with a stone cleaned it up. Replaced chuck. Runout gone.


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## phlegmatic

I have two of these bastards! My guess is that the bearings are very losley adjusted so it can hande such a wide speed spectrum w o running hot?! And the bearing are probably not the nicest top shelf stuff, so on the cheap a plain bearing could be substituted! A future project of mine!


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## arnoldb

Had the same problem on my slightly bigger Chinese drill.

The chuck looked OK, so I blued up the morse taper part of the jacobs->morse adapter supplied with the drill, and did a test-fit in my lathe's tailstock. The result was horrible on the morse part, so I bought a good quality new adapter, fit the supplied chuck to it and things are a LOT better - not perfect but passable without buying a new chuck as well.

Regards, Arnold


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## TroyO

I guess it's a little old by now.. but someone may find it in a search some day.

I tool mine all the way apart, drilled/tapped the spline shaft for a 1/4-20 thread and put some threaded rod in it. Gives me a nice solid depth stop. I also filled the column with concrete, and got a decent-ish chuck (JT33 taper) and it made the machine a lot better.


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## Stan

Like most of the import tools, it is luck of the draw in what you get. The first one I had was turned into scrap but the second one is not too bad. If you take them apart, you find the spindle is a loose fit in the quill and the quill is a loose fir in the head casting. Nothing much you can do about either problem, short of building it into a drillpress. If you are going to do that, you might as well start from scratch.


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## TroyO

Well, I gently hammered the splines too... LOL, not sure it was smart but it worked.

I'm actually thinking I will turn it in to a tapping stand instead, I have a floor model now. The floor model has a screw that rides the quill and keeps that snug. I wonder if you could do something like that with the small one?

Anyway... the concrete in the column helps a lot.


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## Twmaster

Good points...

I had to sell the old drill press as I lost my house and had very limited space n my moving vehicle.

As luck would have it I was at a swap machinist/blacksmith swap meet today and bought a much older version of the drill press I had for a whopping $20. It has a little runout but is not anywhere near as bad as the other machine.

It's a simple beast and I may take it apart and see about tightening things up. Then again, it was $20 and works well enough...


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## ianjkirby

I once had a similar problem with a chinese mill. It would only cut on one tooth of a multi-tooth end mill. In desperation, I removed the spindle, to check it on a lathe. It was as true as one could wish. The problem turned out to be a burr on the shoulder of the spindle where the main bearing sat, not letting the bearing sit correctly. A few minutes with a fine stone, and re-assembled everything and the spindle ran very true. Like most chinese tools, it just needed stripping and cleaning.
Regards, Ian.


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## Stan

> I'm actually thinking I will turn it in to a tapping stand instead



I posted on that solution some time ago. My original small drillpress base was so badly made that I had to mill it before I could use it for a tap guide. There was a long thread on pillar tools and a picture of my effort is post #28.

http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/index.php?topic=1801.15


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## rockets

TroyO  said:
			
		

> I guess it's a little old by now.. but someone may find it in a search some day.
> 
> I tool mine all the way apart, drilled/tapped the spline shaft for a 1/4-20 thread and put some threaded rod in it. Gives me a nice solid depth stop. I also filled the column with concrete, and got a decent-ish chuck (JT33 taper) and it made the machine a lot better.
> 
> 
> I coudn't help it....
> 
> Did you fill it with concrete so it sinks better when you finally lose all of your patients and throw it in the canal?  :big:


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## TroyO

Haha, nope. I did it so it would work perfectly... and now it does!

It holds the boat exactly where I want it! ;-) :big:


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## Deanofid

TroyO  said:
			
		

> Haha, nope. I did it so it would work perfectly... and now it does!
> 
> It holds the boat exactly where I want it! ;-) :big:



That's priceless, Troy!  ;D

The small one that HF sells may be more valuable as parts than as a drill press. They're $59. For that you get a motor, a couple of cast iron step pulleys, two useful castings in the base and table, a nice piece of large tubing, a suspect chuck, a few steel shafts, a not great but usable belt, and some soft screws.

A guy could make a number of good projects with that stuff. Maybe not a drill press, but other things..


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## Twmaster

And it's an even cheaper deal when they have them on sale for $44.99! 



Thankfully the used older replacement I bought works well enough for now! Otherwise I've got all them parts for $20!


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## TroyO

Heh... if I remembor correctly it was on sale for $39.99 and I used a 20% cupon.... :bow:

I have a floor standing DP now so I don't use the small one much. The small one i had before this one lasted years and I stripped off the bits and bobs before i tossed it. (Chuck failed.) One of the pulleys still lives on my 8x14 lathe, motor pulley for the variable speed conversion.

Both have made many a hole, but mostly in wood.


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## SAM in LA

The title of this thread reminds me of the Nicorette commercial.

"Quiting smoking sucks!, Nicorette makes it suck less"

 Rof} Rof}

SAM


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## jstinem

Guys,
It's drill press, not a jig boring machine or a mill.  Just use good quality bits that are properly sharpened and always start in punch mark or a spotting hole and it will work as well as any drill press will. If you need better holes then you need something other than a drill press to make them. 
Go make some chips,
Joe


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## Stan

> It's drill press,



That depends on how lucky you are. Some don't qualify for that description.

 If the point of the bit runs in a circle somewhere around the punch mark, then it is not a drill press. Putting the bit in the punch mark before starting the motor is assuming that the motor has enough starting torque to turn the bit. On the first one I had, the original motor did not have enough torque to start if you held the chuck between thumb and forefinger.

China leads the world in motor technology! The Western world is years behind and uses two to three times the amount of material in a motor to obtain the same horsepower. ;D


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## Twmaster

*The Western world is years behind and uses two to three times the amount of material in a motor to obtain the same horsepower.*

China has small horses.


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## dsquire

Twmaster  said:
			
		

> *The Western world is years behind and uses two to three times the amount of material in a motor to obtain the same horsepower.*
> 
> China has small horses.



Maybe their Metric Horses! :hDe:

Cheers *knuppel2*

Don


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## EJJensen

Considering this is the second result on google when searching for "chinese drill press", i thought i would chime in. 

I have 2 cheap drill presses, bought one for 60&#8364; (3 pulleys, 10 gears, 500w) and got one for free (5 gears, 250 w). The one i bought always had about 1mm (50 thou) of runout, and i thought it was just the way a cheap drill is expected to be. As i got the second one however, i reconsidered as i measured about 5/100mm (2 thou) of runout on this one.

I finally got around to dislodging the chuck from my first drill (a B16 taper) which was pretty hard to get off, and the taper on it was also running very close to true, so i second that the chuck is the main problem in most cases, not the spindle or quill. I did however have about 4mm of axial movement when the spindle was "hanging loose", which was caused by the lock groove being cut at the wrong location and the upper bearing being a sliding fit. I put in a spring washer and a normal washer on top and replaced the worn bearings, which fixed the problem. I do however find it pretty funny that the chinese actually use regular ball bearings for an aplication that mostly sees axial loads. In my case it was 2 6201zz bearings.

So, when having checked the chuck, taper and bearings in the spindle, the only cause of error left is the large toleranced on the quill and headstock, which is hard to fix without nearly building a new headstock. The drill is however a pretty decent machine after having fixed the above. 

Kind regards, Esben


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## Wagon173

Not too hip to drill presses as I got myself a nice jet benchtop and have nothing but good stuff to say about it.  Seems that you aught to be able to modify the bearing mount to accept a decent wheel bearing though?  Take that with a grain of salt.  Good luck, bro!
-Brandon


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