My new pillar / bench drill

[A_Camera]

I got tired of my Bosch PBD 40 and decided to buy a new bench drill machine. The new machine has many advantages, but not everything is better. I am planning to make several videos about it, here is the first one.


https://youtu.be/5_HTjUOUsf8

The specifications are very good, but still, there are rooms for improvement, and I intend to improve it. I will also use it as a mill, tried already and it works quite well on mild steel and aluminium, which I intend to use it on. Of course, it will not be a precision machine, but good enough for my immediate needs. I will however not spend as much effort, time and money as routercnc did: https://www.mycncuk.com/threads/7699-metalworking-pillar-drill-experiences because if I need that sort of quality then I'll buy a real mill, like Optimum or something similar.

Anyway, more video and updates will follow. I hope someone will find it interesting.

[A_Camera]

The reason why I dumped the Bosch PBD 40 is shown in this video:


https://youtu.be/3IsRIDdp05o

Basically, I was very happy with that machine for a many years, but there comes a time when you just want something better.

[A_Camera]

One thing my new bench drill machine did not have, compared to the Bosch PBD 40, was a digital Z depth indicator, so the quill down movement had to be measured and set manually. I really appreciated that feature before, so already when I bought this machine I made a decision of adding that, which seemed to be a simple thing to do. Also quite early after I bought this machine, I bought a cheap XY compound table, but that table is really very bad, the screws have a lot of play and the backlash is really huge on both X and Y, so positioning is really difficult. This made it necessary to either buy a much better compound, which would be very expensive, or spend a countless number of hours on improving this, or at least to add DRO on both X and Y to enable accurate positioning. The first two were not an option because in that case I might as well buy a much better real mill, which I don't want to do for now. However, adding a DRO on both X and Y seemed simple, so off I went, ordered three different ones, one using aluminium scale for the Z, and two stainless steel for the X and Y, the X is longer than the Y and sadly the seller sent me different types, which I complained about and that resulted in 50% refund, so it's fine for me, I don't care about that the X and Y looks different. Anyway, last week I had some time available and made the final installation and added DRO to the XYZ axis. I also made a short video about it, so lean back and enjoy. Here is the video about my solution.


https://youtu.be/jUsEznFB1i4?si=Xh26AYFCXXH601Z4

If anyone is interested I can share the Arduino file.