If you’ve ever been caught in the situation of needing to drill a clean straight hole down the center of a bolt or rod, you’ve probably tried and ended up with a broken bit or tilted hole, and a ton of cursing to boot.

[Vik] let us know about this nifty trick for drilling ‘down the middle’ using a simple hobby drill press and vice. He claims it’s ‘physics guiding the bit’ but in reality its just crafty use of a chuck. Either way the quick trick works, and will hopefully save a lot of hackers some headaches in the future.

Let us know in the comments if you have any simple quick tips that you use when you’re out in the shop.

The hoss machine router is the result of one man’s quest to upgrade the living hell out of a Chinese made mini-mill. He put together a nice USB controller, created his own five axis version thanks to an articulating head and a rotating lathe style table attachment. He even added an automatic tool changer. We’ve had the creator make parts for us before; he does fantastic work.

We built our own modest version of the X2 CNC Mini-mill. It’s based on the same X2 Mini-mill with stepper motors, ball screws, and PIC controller based stepper drivers.

The MechMate CNC router came about by upgrading a ShopBot CNC machine so much that it just wasn’t a ShopBot anymore. The plans are completely free (aside from the odd requirement to paint it blue and slap “MechMate” on it). The claim to fame is that it’s scalable to to greater than 4×8′ sheets for full shop quality production.

Since CNC machines are usually somewhat pocket intensive, we put together a series of How-To’s for Engadget on building a CNC machine from cutting boards and printer parts. Check out part 1, part 2 and part 3 of the build.

[Steve], of the KillaCycle project, set up his CNC machine for pick and place operations. We wrote about it a while back, and since then he put together a PDF writeup of his work. It’s not as detailed as we like, but still interesting.

[Mike] built his own CNC router just for building his custom snowboards. It features a wood router, 80/20 aluminum construction, and a vacuum brush head for collecting the chaff produced as it mills the boards.

The RepRap project has come a long way since we first started covering it. Now it can produce all of the custom plastic parts needed to reproduce itself. SkyNet approves.

Probably one of the nicest mods for a CNC machine is a digital read out. This kit version uses some inexpensive Chinese scales/calipers to get the position data and outputs it to a nice LED display. For manual machining or just calibrating a mill, these things rock.