Drilling again

I discovered these videos, which are an excellent overview if the machine shop, and specifically a machine shop for robotics prototyping. Of course, they have several large expensive machines you simply can't replicate in a home workshop. I've only watched the first one. The second half of that video explains a method for drilling holes very accurately in metal. The basics describe how to mark the work piece, and the accuracy you can expect to get with a few different methods. The accuracy is actually very high - to the extent that the best marking by hand practices can be ignored as a source of errors: drilling is an order of magnitude less accurate even on MITs marvellous drilling machine. Some of the techniques I've already used: using centring drill bits, but I don't have a compound table or centre finder to use the suggested technique.

Before I watched that, I bought a machine vice from Warco. It actually seems like a nice piece of equipment: The action is very smooth and not at all sloppy. Here it is on the drill press, with the swivel base removed:
It's too big with the swivel base attached. The first thing a noticed when I did this was a wobble. It turns out the drill press base isn't all that flat. It's so bad you can easily see it in the picture. It's resting on a drill press table that I've re purposed as a table extension. It doesn't wobble on that, so I guess the milling of the table is not so great.

What I need is a way of sliding the vice so it's easy to get into the right position. Perhaps whatever I make to do that can offer some sort of levelling adjustment. I guess I could make a new version of my little table, where the T-slot is spaced correctly to let me slide the vice back and forth would work.

The other problem with the vice is that some sort of sacrifice is always needed to drill a through hole. Perhaps I'd just be better off with an ordinary drilling vice with slots for fixing, so I can just slide it back and forth.

Is what I really want a compound table?

If I buy a compound table, it's not much more of a stretch to get a mini mill. A little reality check: mini mills are almost all too big. The Sieg Super X1 seems like the front runner but weights 50Kg, and needs 500mm of bench space. The Sieg X0 is small enough, but at 6mm, its drill chuck is too small for my purposes, also, if anyone owns one, they aren't saying anything about it. I saw one youtube video which rather conspicuously lacks a follow-up.

There is a Proxxon mill/drill - system which definitely is small enough. You can actually buy the parts for less than the system on Amazon, I don't need the motor - I can keep using my drill until I decide to do some milling.

While I'm thinking along those lines, I could try the Wabeco drilling/milling stand, which is like the Proxxon on steroids. Just look at the examples of use, ranging from genius to hilarious! There's a huge range of add ons on the site, which increase it's versatility greatly, and it's all cheaper than the Proxxon offerings. I could always get the Proxxon motor (or another one) later and turn it into a mill. So it's either marvellous or terrible. Pointing to terrible is that I own a terrible Wabeco drill vice, which I got with the terrible drill press mentioned earlier, so they do sell some rubbish. Also, I have to wait for them to say what the shipping cost is.




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