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Hydraulic Drill Press on Shoe-String Budget

A super cheap drill press for holding rotary tool flex shaft attachment. Meant for prototyping (PCBs).

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This is a drill press for holding rotary tool flex shaft attachment meant for drilling holes in Prototype PCBs. This is a cheap and easy to make drill assist that doesn't require a lot of tools, nuts and bolts and other metal parts and is quite precise.

Recently I wanted to start designing electronic circuits and make prototype PCBs at home as a hobby. 

I started gathering all the necessary tools and techniques including things required for layout transfer, etching, drilling etc. Soon I realized that I will need a drill press for drilling holes inPCBs. I looked up options to buy, most of the decent ones were >$30 and bulky. Now I live in a small 2BHK apartment, of which I have turned 1 room into my lab and an another bulky addition to it would have required some good reasoning. 3D options were rare and required a lot of metal parts, not easy to find everywhere.  

Putting things in perspective and defining use case: Neither am I a mechanical guy nor do I have any time or intent of  specializing  or drilling PCBs on regular basis, for professional PCBs I would just go to one of many PCB houses, as its just not worth my time. Hence this project, with the sole purpose of getting that first prototype/proof of concept board as soon as possible before wasting money and copper in getting them professionally made.  The purpose of this project is not to be a potential candidate for replacing existing super complex, lightening fast and precise drilling techniques, but is to share, a super low cost way of getting something done with good enough precision, with the maker community, in a hope that it can be useful to someone with same use case.

This is a drill press for holding rotary tool flex shaft attachment. It is a cheap and easy to make drill assist that doesn't require a lot of tools, nuts and bolts and other metal parts and is quite precise. The flex shaft holder is detachable and If needed I can make a mod to hold the rotary tool instead.

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  • 4 × 20 ml syringes with tube Tube might have to be purchased seperately. Need to make 2 pairs of 2 syringe each for hydraulic mechanism.
  • 2 × M4, >=18mm Screw-nut pairs
  • 1 × Hot Glue and glue gun and super glue Most of us have lying around
  • 1 × Ability to 3D print

  • 1
    Step 1

    Actually its pretty straight forward. Once you have everything 3D printed, look at the uploaded images and video to see what fits where.

  • 2
    Tips and suggestions
    1. The two towers that hold two injections, will fit in the base perfectly if printed vertically instead of laying flat (horizontal, one might prefer to do this, in order to remove supports) on the printer base. If printed horizontally, it might need some hot glue to be held together with the base.
    2. I got those injections and tubing from ebay, there are many sellers.
    3. The only critical part is how the injections are connected to each other through the tubing, its a simple hydraulic/pneumatic principle, that I don't thing need explanation. I am sure everyone can figure that out. And I just want to point out the importance of moving the two pair of injections together in sync. It works perfectly fine with/without a fluid.
    4. The horizontal lift handles are hot glued onto the tops of two vertical injections. (Would like to change this, if I get time)
    5. The control combiner that holds the two horizontal injections together while pushing/pulling might also need some hot glue.
    6. Super glue lift-part1 and lift-part2

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Dan Maloney wrote 06/29/2020 at 16:16 point

Impressively hacky. Nice job!

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