Defeated by my drill press

[FandZ]

I'm building a moving table cnc and I was making my roller assemblies on my harbor freight drill press. I adjusted the left and right angle of the drill press table and squared it to the bit. But the table dips forward ever so lightly and my holes are a hair off from one side to the other. No way to adjust for up and down. I was drilling 1/2 square aluminum bars. I was moveing at a good clip and didn't even notice it. None of my assemblies will fit together.

I really put some work into it and it chaps my ass. I guess you get what you pay for. I spent a good portion of yesterday cutting the bars to length on my chop saw and then sanding the edges smooth. Before I had them on the drill press, I used my cnc and manually routed the drill points.

As a solution I'm thinking of drilling the off sides a size bigger to about half way through the bar or more till it matches up to be assembled.

I thought I'd share my failure in case it may help someone else building a cnc machine and useing a harbor fright elcheapo drillpress. Any depth beyond 1/4th an inch on it just won't do. At least on the one I have.

[Hdale85]

The Harbor Freight stuff is great for the weekend job but if you need precision shop else where.

[macona]

Yep, had one of those drill presses. Did the same thing. Another thing to watch out for is the depth stop flexes and is not repeatable.

They are good for plastic and wood, otherwise you really need to watch the table deflection.

[FandZ]

Yea, lesson learned. On top of that I broke a 2 flute up spiral metal working bit on some 80/20. I had the feed rate set wrong and it snapped when it hit the tapping tube. 60ipm is plenty fast when something goes wrong.

[Drools]

I went through the same ordeal. I ended up getting the machine shop at work to drill my blocks. However what I started doing is placing wooden blocks between the drill presses sliding table and the work bench. This will prevent the sliding table from flexing but I still don't trust it for percise stuff.

[GeeksGoneBad]

Sorry to hear of the failure FandZ sucks for sure - but it's one of those "live and learn" deals I guess

thanks for sharing so we can learn from your misfortune