Reply To: NANO LATHE

[david pierce]

I do not know if this is a better drill press for the money than the NANO but I purchased a low cost jewelers drill press several years ago for $89.00 new from Ebay. You can see what one looks like if you go to Ebay and pull up item #11861903582. As you can see the price has gone up but the press looks the same. The drill press itself was very nice but I was not happy with the chuck so I removed it to replace it with an Albrecht Keyless Chuck. Unfortunately the spindle taper on the drill press would only fit the low precision chuck that came with the machine and nothing else. I measured the spindle and found it to be 10mm so I purchased a 10mm ER-11 spindle from CTC tooling. The longest spindle they had was too short to replace the existing spindle so I machined the ER-11 spindle and added an extension. I used high strength Loctite to bond the two sections together and then turned the extension down to the 10mm shaft diameter. It worked out great. I ended up with an extremely precise drill press at a reasonable price. One nice feature of the ER-11 collets is they can hold carbide tools and a 3 jaw chuck cannot. Albrecht makes a small keyless chuck with diamond impregnated jaws that will hold carbide drills, but they sell for around $500.00. A standard JT-0 straight shank adapter can be purchased from an industrial supply house and the shank can easily be turned down to fit one of the larger ER-11 collets but I have not done this. If this was the only small drill press I had I would have but I also have a Dumore and a Jet with high precision chucks.
david