drill press

40 Articles

AC Motor Converted Into DC EBike Powerplant

January 15, 2026 by 12 Comments

AC induction motors are everywhere, from ceiling fans to vehicles. They’re reliable, simple, and rugged — but there are some disadvantages. It’s difficult to control the speed without complex electronics, and precisely placing the shaft at a given angle is next to impossible. But the core of these common induction machines can be modified and rewired into brushless DC (BLDC) motors, provided you have a few tools on hand as [Austin] demonstrates.

To convert an AC induction motor to a brushless DC electric motor (BLDC), the stator needs to be completely rewired. It also needs a number of poles proportional to the number of phases of the BLDC controller, and in this case the 24-pole motor could accommodate the three phases. [Austin] removed the original stator windings and hand-wound his own in a 16-pole configuration. The rotor needs modification as well, so he turned the rotor on a lathe and then added a set of permanent magnets secured to the rotor with JB Weld. From there it just needs some hall effect sensors, a motor controller and power to get spinning.

At this point the motor could be used for anything a BLDC motor would be used. For this project, [Austin] is putting it on a bicycle. A 3D printed pulley mounts to the fixed gear on the rear wheel, and a motor controller, battery, and some tensioners are all that is left to get this bike under power. His tests show it comfortably drawing around 1.3 kW so you may want to limit this if you’re in Europe but other than that it works extremely well and reminds us of one of our favorite ebike conversions based on a washing machine motor instead of a drill press.

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More Drill Press Mods: Adding A VFD Means No More Belt Changes

March 10, 2023 by 29 Comments

A decent drill press is an essential machine tool for almost any kind of shop, and marks a significant step up in precision compared to a hand drill. The ability to drill square, true holes is one thing, but the added power over what’s possible with a portable tool is the real game changer. If only you didn’t have to switch around those damn belts to change speeds, though.

You don’t, of course, if you go through the effort to add a variable frequency drive to your drill press like [Midwest Cyberpunk] did, along with some other cool mods. The donor tool for these mods came from — where else? — Harbor Freight. Some will quibble with that choice, but the tool was pretty cheap, and really all [Midwest] was interested in here was some decent castings and a quill with acceptable runout, since the entire power train of the tool was slated for replacement. The original motor gave way to a beefy Baldor 3-phase/240-volt motor controlled by a VFD mounted on a bracket to the left of the drill press head, allowing the stock belt and step pulley transmission to be greatly simplified. Continue reading “More Drill Press Mods: Adding A VFD Means No More Belt Changes” →

A Nicely Accurate PCB Drill Press You Can Build Yourself

May 25, 2022 by 6 Comments

Making PCBs isn’t always just about getting nice copper traces on a lovely fiberglass board. There’s often lots of drilling to be done! This PCB drill press from [w_k_fay] should help you do just that with the finesse and accuracy of a pro.

The design isn’t particularly fancy or pretty, but just simply focuses on doing a simple job well. There’s a basic DC motor, sitting on a linear rail so that it has minimal deflection in the X and Y axes as it moves up and down. Special care was taken to ensure the linear rail was mounted perfectly perpendicular to the base to ensure the drill doesn’t wander or splay off target.

A collet chuck is used to center the bit as well as possible for a good price. The build also includes a bright LED in order to give you the best possible view of your work. Power is via a variable bench supply which allows for variable speed as necessary. There’s a foot pedal to activate the drill which allows both hands to be used for positioning the work for added ease of use.

The total build came in at under $50 spend by the time [w_k_fay] was done. Alternatively, you could use this 3D printed design to build your own as well. If you’ve been whipping up your own useful tools for the home shop, though, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

An unfastened piece of pipe in a drill press, rotating away

Drill Press Piece Fastening 101

April 17, 2022 by 16 Comments

What are the options you have for securing your workpiece to the drill press table? [Rex Krueger] shows us that there’s plenty, and you ought to know about them. He goes through the disadvantages of the usual C-clamps, and shows options like the regular drill press vice and a heavy-duty version that even provides a workpiece tilting mechanism, and points out small niceties like the V-grooves on the clamps helping work with round stock. For larger pieces, he recommends an underappreciated option — woodworkers’ wooden handscrew clamps, which pair surprisingly well with a drill press. Then, he talks about the hold-down drill press clamps, a favourite of his, especially when it comes to flat sheets of stock like sheet metal or plastic.

As a bonus for those of us dealing with round stock, he shows a V-block he’s made for drilling into its side, and round stock clamp, made by carefully drilling a pair of wooden hand screw clamps, for when you need to drill into a dowel from its top. The ten-minute video is a must watch for anyone not up to speed on their drill press piece fastening knowledge, and helps you improve your drilling game without having skin in it.

We’ve covered a few ingenious and unconventional drill piece fastening options before, from this wise held down by repurposed bicycle quick-release parts, to an electromagnetic wise that left our readers with mixed opinions.

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Drill press modded with a treadmill motor, speed controller, lights, and a tachometer.

Drill Press Runs Faster On A Treadmill Motor

September 9, 2021 by 20 Comments

Are you tired of the same old video style from your favorite content creators? We can’t say that we were, exactly. But nevertheless, we appreciate this creative departure from [Eric Strebel]’s regular fare as he soups up his drill press with an old treadmill motor and a few extra features.

First off, that commentator in the video is right — 2.6 horsepower is a crazy amount for a drill press. Fortunately, [Eric] also added a variable speed controller and a digital tachometer to keep things in check. As an added bonus, he no longer has to get under the hood and mess with the belts.

We like what [Eric] brings to the drill press motor mod, which is already well-documented on YouTube. We love the re-use of an office chair bracket as a new motor mount. It’s probably our favorite bit aside from the 2-color forward/reverse switch plate idea: print it in whatever letter color you want with proud lettering, paint the whole thing black, and sand off the letters so the color shows. Check it out after the break.

There are many ways to make your own drill press, and one of the easiest is to mount a hand drill.

Did you miss the Industrial Design Hack Chat with [Eric]? It’s okay, you can read the transcript over on IO.

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Portable Drill Press

May 22, 2021 by 31 Comments

We aren’t sure that [John Heisz’s] build is really what we think of as a drill press, but it is a very portable way to convert a regular drill into something like a drill press. Your drill will probably be different, but you can follow along with his build in the video below.

On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like this would be very hard, but there are a few tricks. Finding the exact center of the drill axis on the back of the drill takes a bit of effort.

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Machining Without Machines

December 18, 2020 by 22 Comments

It’s a luxury to be able to access a modern machine shop, complete with its array of lathes, mills, and presses. These tools are expensive though, and take up a lot of space, so if you want to be able to machine hard or thick metals without an incredible amount of overhead you’ll need a different solution. Luckily you can bypass the machines in some situations and use electricity to do the machining directly.

This project makes use of a process known as electrochemical machining and works on the principle that electricity passed through an electrolyte solution will erode the metal that it comes in contact with. With a well-designed setup, this can be used to precisely machine metal in various ways. For [bob]’s use this was pretty straightforward, since he needed to enlarge an existing hole in a piece of plate steel, so he forced electrolyte through this hole while applying around half an amp of current in order to make this precise “cut” in the metal, avoiding the use of an expensive drill press.

There are some downsides to the use of this process as [bob] notes in his build, namely that any piece of the working material that comes in contact with the electrolyte will be eroded to some extent. This can be mitigated with good design but can easily become impractical. It’s still a good way to avoid the expense of some expensive machining equipment, though, and similar processes can be used for other types of machine work as well.