Using a Portable Drill Press

There are plenty of times in woodworking where it makes more sense to take the tool to the work than the work to the tool, and that's what really the drillmate pro is all about is it gives you a portable drill press that you can do like 11 million different things with. So even if you own a drill press from what I'm about to show you, you're gonna find it's pretty handy to have one of these in your shop. So let's look at big picture first. Big picture is, obviously I can put a drill bit in here. I can put a drill here, and then that's gonna allow me to plunge and drill holes.

We've got a bunch of features going on here. One is there's a V right here that allows me to put stock in that V centered under the drill. We're gonna do that in just a second. On board key storage, so you're always gonna know where that is. That's pretty darn convenient and of course when we drill a hole we probably wanna know when to stop.

That's what this is for that'll allow you to control depth of cut. One of the things that is maybe most handy about this is. In addition to drilling perpendicular to the surface, we can drill at angles, and I'm gonna show you an application for that. So let's start by just getting a drill bit in here. And then have a look at.

My stock is there. We're gonna plunge into it. And I wanna set my depth stop, so again. That's here So what this will allow me to do is this. Depth of hole will be consistent because of the stop centering the hole because of the V blocks.

So a great way to drill round stack and stack in general by letting it nest into that V. Let's look at a bunch of other stuff that the drill make pearl do for you. Here's a great example of the benefit of taking the tool to the work instead of the work to the tool. If you want to make an MFT, a multi-function table, it's probably gonna be some big old slab or something like MDF into which you need to drill many, many, many, many holes. Portable drill press like the drill Ma Pro is a great way to do that.

We can add a fence to it. So what I wanna do is get the fence so that I'm maintaining this distance from the edge. We can take advantage of the centering bull's eye device, drop that in. Use that to get on my layout lines like that. And then in that position.

Bring the fence over. So this is gonna get me registered again. I'm, I'm looking for relative to the edge. So that I don't have to pay as much attention as I'm moving from one location to the next. What we're getting out of this is the promise of that hole is gonna be perfectly perpendicular to our work, something that we wouldn't get if we were just simply drilling all these holes by hand.

When you get deeper in when I can no longer use the fence. Then we could do this a couple of different ways. There are in the jig indexes, index marks. So for me. When I look inside here, I can see.

That little V right there that indicates the center of the system and there's one there, there, there, there so no longer able to use the fence because we're way out here in the middle someplace. What I can do is. Put those marks, those V's on my pencil lines in order to locate the drill mate, and then I can punch my hole. So there are a bunch of different ways. You have this device, you have the fence, you have the index lines, and then of course you have doing a touchdown to see where you are that you can use in order to locate this accurately on your work.

So taking the tool to the work for something like an MFT table like this, it's a great way to go. If you have a surface that you're putting holes in that you want to protect, you don't want the base of the drill mate riding back and forth on the surface. There are protective pads you can put on the bottom that will prevent you from scratching that surface as we work across it. So you've got a nice slab or in this case a cookie and you wanna put legs on it and you want those legs to come in at an angle, great way to do it. We can set the drill make Pro to an angle.

One of the other things I've done is in addition to angling it, I've added a shotmate base. You can use this to get a little bit wider stance and a little more stability. And also, as I'm doing in this case, it makes it easier to clamp to the work so we can secure everything once we get it where we want it. So I'm taking advantage again of those index marks that are built into the base of it to get on my pencil lines and then. Drill our 10 degree hole.

If you need more depth capacity, the other thing we can do is a little bit of disassembly we can remove those return springs, and that's gonna let you go deeper with the holes. So again, you know, a lot of stuff going on here, the ability to take the tool to the work on large jobs like that MFT also being able to drill angle holes like we're doing here in the bottom of a slab or whatever else you want to drill those holes into. The centering devices that are built into the base, so a lot of cool stuff going on that makes the drillMate Pro a nice addition to have.