Drill press table lift

a1606myrsclm · October 14, 2018

I built an auxiliary table for my drill press, quickly found out that raising and lowering it was very difficult. My drill press doesn’t have any mechanism to help, just the clamp on the original table. I considered removing the table, but really didn’t want to do that every time.

Here is the picture that I based my design on...

But since I was building it, I decided to power it with an electric motor. I found a little motor that only turns at 6 rpm. I purchased a ¾” x 6 tpi acme screw with nuts. I first thought I would make the brackets out of metal, but my shop is not really set up for metal working. I figured a piece of white oak would be strong enough. A friend of mine has a metal lathe and turned down the screw for me.

I started with the top bracket..

I constructed the middle bracket as a bridge to minimize racking.

Fitted the nuts.

Checked for alignment and the spacing.

I didn’t measure well, but it worked out the overlap of the supports locked in the nuts.

I setup to drill clearance for the screw.

I first placed the bracket on top, but it was unstable. It needed to be thicker, it also interfered with the belt, so I decided to move it below the drill press head. I also add a few more pieces to make it more stable.

I add two pieces of wood to make the top bracket thicker around the post, this improved the stability. I ran a test before adding the bottom piece, the whole unit would twist and the middle bracket would bind up causing the motor to stall. The addition of the bottom bracket help but it still would twist, so in later pictures I added split collar that clamped the top and bottom brackets in place.