Upgrade your Shop Drill Press // Easy Woodshop Project

is your shop drill press really keeping you down tired of all the fumbling scrapping and just downright ugly projects how about the rusty old drill press table ruining your projects and what about dust collection just impossible right the constant struggle keeping wood chips out of your coffee kid's hair and the dishwasher what if i told you there was a better way introducing the drill press table 4000 the answer to all of your woes brought to you by shop nation this overly engineered table comes complete with space-age fence storage drawers and integrated dust collection don't miss out what is going on you guys i'm travis this is shop nation and today we're going to be tackling the old trusty drill press and more specifically making it more effective and efficient in your shop now having a drill press especially a floor standing drill press like i have comes in super handy but i found that there's a bit to be desired when it comes to the standard cast table that comes on these drill presses now if your shop is a metal shop this isn't a problem but for those of us that do only woodworking projects or a hybrid of metal and woodworking it presents kind of a challenge and that issue is getting all of the nasties from the cast iron table onto the wood piece that you're working on so really you need a barrier when you're doing the woodworking side of whatever you're doing in your shop now the easiest solution is literally just take a piece of plywood clamp it to the drill press table you're done but there's a lot more that you can add in terms of functionality than just a piece of wood and the next best option is a pre-made drill press table like this one that i have from wen they really ramp up the functionality by adding things like t-track and rulers and fence systems and replaceable drill plates but there's still some things we can do to improve this and the first one is dust collection now dust collection on a drill press is something that i ignored for well up until now but it really creates a giant mess when you're drilling a bunch of holes especially if you're using big forstner bits that makes big old wood chips so i'm going to toss the store-bought option and build my own now i like many of you start any project by just doing my research and there are plenty of drill press tables out there on the youtubes and i kind of took some things that i liked from this design and maybe added it to this design that i really liked and i think i've come up with a great design that is a compromise for the drill press now i'll start by giving credit where credit is due i took several ideas from the jonathan katz moses drill press table that i watched on youtube if you haven't ever heard of him or checked out his channel i'll leave a link in the description below really good and the guy makes great videos and what i liked most about his design is it incorporates dust collection in a way that i really haven't seen other drill press tables use so combining that with a couple other little tricks that i've added to it i've come up with a great compromise of a drill press table that i think can have a home in any shop and yes i have full color build plans available you can click on this link or you can wait till the end and find it in the video description below now this is a project that pretty much anyone can tackle in a matter of hours so if you're looking for a quick weekend project this just might be it all right so first things first we'll use the cut sheets they're in the plans get all of our pieces cut out [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so we've got all the parts cut out using the cut sheets from the plans there's a couple more little things we need to do but really it's just assembly and finish and then we're done but before we get to assembly we've got to do a couple more things i cut some dadoes for some t-track as well some cutouts on the fence [Music] i should also mention that there's an alternative to building your own fence you can buy a really nice extruded aluminum fence this one's made by powertech it's got a measurement indicator along the top it comes with a flip kind of little stop block system super cool obviously a little bit more expensive than building your own but a really good option that just so happens to fit this design perfectly i will have this as well as anything else i'm using in the video linked in the video description down below if you want to go check it out all right so some more prep work to be done these pockets will be for magnets that we'll install later [Music] now there are a couple of cutouts needed for this design but lucky for you the plans detail all of that out [Music] now we need to cut some grooves for the t-track i'm gonna try out my new built-in router table and my workbench now i don't have a fence for this yet so i had to get creative and definitely check out this workbench build if you missed it [Music] so i will say this wasn't exactly the best or even safest method on the planet but it did end up working great for these blind slots let's take a second to thank the sponsor of this video which is green chef green chef is a usda certified organic company that makes eating well easy and affordable with plans to fit every kind of lifestyle this includes dishes that are vegan vegetarian paleo and even keto recipes are quick and easy with step-by-step instructions chef tips and even photos to guide you along now what makes screen chef different than the rest well it's the most sustainable meal kit out there they actually offset 100 of their carbon emission and plastic packaging in every box now what i really like about green chef when you have a busy schedule like mine it makes cooking easy with dinner options that work around your schedule not the other way around so when using a service like this you let green chef actually do the planning the grocery shopping and even most of the prep work for you week after week so if that sounds like something you want to try out with your family go to greenchef.usc 90 shop nation and use the promo code 90 shop nation to get 90 off including free shipping of your first box of course that link will also be down in the video description if you just want to go click that but make sure you use the code 90 shop nation to get that 90 off including free shipping on your first box seriously for anyone with a busy schedule this is an excellent option and thank you green chef for sponsoring this video let's get back out there now finally time for assembly everything goes together with glue and brad nails for the most part there are two small drawers in this design and i didn't want to give up valuable space to drawer slides so i'm opting for slideless drawers using the slick side of some party board to act as a low friction bottom so now to square up the fence elimination we made earlier [Music] [Music] these counter wars will make sense later trust the process [Music] installing some threaded inserts into the eventual top of the table this is going to actually make it interchangeable in the future we'll talk about this later [Music] a far less sketchy way to cut these dados compared to a makeshift fence on the router table this little handy corner radius jig is available through my etsy shop if you're interested [Music] so [Music] okay with that we're done i'm just kidding we're gonna paint it okay so you know for sure that i'm gonna paint this thing you don't have to but it looks a lot better if you do your choice now i've used shellac on the last several of my builds with mdf tops and it's holding up really really well it's easy to apply and it makes your shop stuff really durable [Music] since this project is so small i thought i'd just brush the paint rather than spray it which is usually my typical application method and of course the same gray color as the rest of my shop furniture [Music] [Music] quick reminder that there are full color build plans if you want to build your own check the links i got to say i am super pumped to start using this drill press table it's got everything built into it that i could possibly ask for without being too overbearing now i really thought about going overboard and just putting tons of cabinets and all this other stuff but at the end of the day sometimes simpler is better the dust collection system works really well it could probably use some tweaking as far as how big this insert is and whether there's a hole drilled in the center i don't know i gotta play around with a little bit but so far i really like it now we did build our own fence but i gotta say i kind of like the store-bought one call me crazy i just think it's simple it's super rigid i like the little stop lock system but this one works really well as well the one thing that this has this does not is the little cutout for the dust collection which works really well so if anything i might just cut a little opening there and maybe 3d print a little backer to go on the back i don't know yet but there are a couple features that maybe you caught during the build the first one is that there are magnetic catches on the drawer slides so when i push them back drawer kind of sucks back onto the magnet this means that when i take it off of the drill press the drawers are probably not going to fall out i hope another cool thing is how it's attached to the actual table itself so if you remember the bottom side of this table has two t-tracks this means that regardless of what your table looks like it should be able to mount because it can kind of configure to whatever bolt pattern or diagonal pattern your table has so something that you may have caught during the build is that this top is actually removable there's four bolts from underneath and this whole top can be taken off and the reason i did that is because when i want to move to metal cutting and drilling i'm thinking i can make a dedicated top just for that kind of remove this one put the new one on do all my stuff and then put this one back on it's only four bolts it's pretty quick and i think that's kind of a cool compromise if you've got a hybrid shop where you do both metal and wood also you may be wondering what this little slot here in the middle is the space was gonna go to waste and when i was doing my modeling i figured out that it's pretty much the exact size of a tape measure so i thought well i'm constantly losing these things around the shop so now i have a little cubby hole to keep a tape measure super handy now there are also a couple things that you can add to this to make it even better and the first one is the sort of rigid suction hose thing this you can mount to somewhere back here have an extra nozzle for dust collection just to make it that much better so that's something i'm probably gonna do in the future also i added some of those magnetic bars on each side of the drill press table and this just makes it that much more functional because i keep all my most commonly used tools i use on the drill press sort of attached right here they're out of the way but they're within really easy reach thank you guys so much for watching this has been a kind of a fun project a smaller scale project that i think pretty much anybody can do and anyone with a drill press can certainly use one of these things if you enjoyed the video hit the like button if you like content like this or anything else in my shop go ahead and hit subscribe and down in the comments tell me what you thought about the project or maybe what you would have added if you did it yourself i'd love to hear it all right guys i'm gonna go start drilling some holes for another project and until then keep pursuing shop great [Music]

Channel: Shop Nation

Views: 95,131

Rating: 4.9496245 out of 5

Keywords: shopnation, shop nation, drill press table, drill press upgrade, drill press, drill press organization, shop organization, shop furniture, garage shop, woodshop, woodshop organization, home workshop, drill table, drill stand, drill press stand, best drill press table, WEN drill press table, how to make a drill press table, drill press fence, drill press table fence, simple drill press table, easy drill press table

Id: 2O0ggJtA38k

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 23 2021