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Comment by Brian Thompson on January 3, 2019 at 11:44pm

Like most of us I'm sure, I prefer to use hand tools as much as possible with my builds but for certain jobs power tools can be very helpful. I only use this drill for two jobs, drilling the tuner holes in the head stock and the holes for the string ferrules in the tail stock. My other go too is my Dremel, used with a precision router base for inlays and a few other things. Wherever possible I always use a hand drill (dot inlays) or even a pin vice/archimedes drill, for side maker dots and other jobs that require a very fine drill bit, like tuner mounting screw holes and the string guide screw on the head stock face.

As such, there is no way I could truly justify the cost of a bench mounted pillar drill, and not having a workshop currently would have nowhere to mount it, but I still felt that I needed something more precise, especially on my last build where I had to fit the tuners side by side on the head stock to leave room for an inlay but only had 1 mm to spare from the edge of the head stock to the tuner bodies on either side....that's not a lot of room for error with a big old drill bit....they also need to be perfectly vertical of course. 

This is where a basic drill press really comes into it's own and takes a lot of the 'stress' out of it, and as I know The Nation loves a nice 'n' easy, and preferably cheap hack, I thought I'd post my solution. 

You can get these drill presses on amazon and eBay and are seriously cheap....mine cost less than £10.00 GBP/$12.96 USD delivered. But.....they are cheap for a reason! Reading reviews highlighted issues people had with theirs, the most common being crushing of the tube upright when tightening the two bolts that secure it to the boss on the base. Another was play in the lever that you control the vertical up and down movement of the drill with, along with general quality control issues common with cheap Chinese imports.

I gave it some thought and came up with a few ideas that I thought might solve these issues and decided to order one and have a play.....In the pic above you can see the finished item, and in the following pics I've tried to show what the problems where and how I fixed them. OK, you wouldn't want to build a space shuttle with it (!), but for 'our' needs, I've ended up with a very usable and very handy bit of kit that works well and didn't cost the earth. It's also 'portable', easy to store away when not in use and with careful use, easily accurate enough for building guitars. Te only additional parts I bought for it where the hardwood dowl for the upright (see next pic), a couple of large stainless bolts, nuts and washers to mount the press base to the wooden plynth, and the plywood plynth itself. Everything else was on my shelf. The following pics will hopefully make things clearer.

If you need something like this in your life, I reckon you could bring one home for less than $20 all in. 

Brian Thompson.