Fast Drill Press Fence Upgrade

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. I absolutely love working with this Powermatic drill press. It is convenient, got lots of features, but there's one area that we had to work on and that's improving the fence over here and I'll tell you all about it. Stay tuned. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. I love having this drill press in our makerspace. It is the Powermatic Model 2800. It's an 18-inch variable speed drill press and boy, it has some great features that they actually had the woodworker in mind. A lot of drill presses, the majority of them, are actually set up for the metalworking trade, but this one's set up for us woodworkers. Well, let me show you a couple things on it that I really like. Number one, you can see it has an LED speed readout. Right now, we're running at 733 RPM, but if I want to change that, I've got a larger small bit. I can simply unscrew this and on the fly, I can rotate that up and there we are. Now, I'm running at over 2000 RPM or if I need to really slow it down, I can do that again. Bring it forward and I can bring it all the way down to, in this case, just under 500 RPM. So, that is a great feature. I don't have to stop, start, flip the lid, change pulleys. It does it right on the fly. And the second thing is what I just showed you. The safety switch is this flat button right where you need it, but here's something that's really cool about this. When it's running, let's suppose your hands are busy and you've got some reason you really need to shut it down. Well, instead of fumbling for a switch, you can either throw a shoulder and shut it off or you could even do a head bump if you needed to. It's very handy and they really thought this through well. Add the laser right here where this is on and off and then you can see down on the work, a laser's cast showing where the point is. That is a really handy feature. And also for additional illumination, you can see there's a lamp system right here where you can throw extra lamps right here, two LEDs. And in dim light, those really help. And of course, it has the standard three-arm type of rotation device over here. That's pretty standard, depth stops and so forth. All that is great. Now, another thing that they did on this particular model is they began thinking about the woodworker and putting a larger table, replaceable insert. And there is actually extension wings that are on these to bring out for more stability with cam locks on both sides. And so you can put those back together and lock them in. Nice table, crank is easily available. There's a tilt and all those sort of things. They actually have a pretty doggone good fence that has T-slots in it. And you can open and close this for width for the built-in dust extraction system. You can put your vacuum hose there and it does a decent job of removing all the shavings on the fly as you go. You only need to do a little bit of dust touch-up afterwards. What's my main complaint on this unit? Well, it's right here on the fence. If you're working from this area and if your drill press happens to be in a place where it's fairly close in line with other tools and it isn't really easy to get around to the side to work on the back, reaching over to change out these nuts right here or to loosen them, as you can see, especially on this one, is pretty clunky. And you only get your fingers on, you know, X amount of space. And now you're going to move that to where you want it, adjust the fence to your object. Then you're going to reach back. And again, you're kind of working on the top of the knobs and it's just clunky. So the solution, whether it's this drill press, this fence, or one that you have that's similar or a shop-made fence that you've done for your makerspace, the idea is to get those adjustment knobs up where you can access them. We're going to do that really quickly. First thing we're going to do is just go ahead and remove one of these right here. And as you can see, that is what it looks like when you remove it. And I'm going to remove the other one as well, so you can see what it's fastening into. What you've got is threaded inserts that slide under these keyed miter areas. And then we'll go ahead and remove them. There they are right there. So you can see those are fit so that once they're in these T-shaped slots here, you can't lift them out. And then these are threaded into them through the object you're going to tighten. Now these may look like 516th standard drill, or excuse me, standard threaded bolts. They are not. They're metric. These are 8 millimeter, 1.25 thread pitch threads. So you need to get those from a good supplier for what we're going to do. All right, let's go ahead and build an adaptation and extend this out to get the handle up above it. Follow me. All right, this is a pretty simple project. You only need a few simple supplies, but sourcing them sometimes can be a little hard. This right here is a little piece of length of stock, and these are some that I cut from the other piece that I had. That is your 8 millimeter, 1.25 millimeter pitch thread stock that we're going to extend these with using coupling nuts. Now what I suggest you do is you go to a well-stocked specialty hardware store. I've found the big box stores like Home Depot, Lowe's, so forth, tend to have limited areas like this, but some of the smaller ones like True Value Hardware, Ace Hardware may have whole specialty bolt aisles, which you can take a look at and come up with some really unique things. That's where we got this was at our local True Value and got this set of stock. What we had trouble with is coming up with these coupling nuts, and as you can see, I bought this from one of my favorite online suppliers, BoltDepot.com, and they were able to, these were like 70 cents each, and what these threaded coupling nuts allow us to do is to build an extension on this. So what we're going to do is we're going to take one of these that just came off of the drill press fence. We'll go ahead and attach, actually let's just do both while we're at it. We're going to go ahead and extend, create a new socket. To make sure they don't unthread when you're tightening is we're going to use some red Loctite, which is the high strength or sometimes affectionately called permanent. We makers know nothing is permanent. So I'm going to go ahead and load the threads here with that compound, and then we'll go ahead and thread on that eight millimeter coupling nut, and we'll tighten that down. So now we have an extension on there with a socket in which we can extend, and let's do it again. All right, now you have two that have a socket on it ready to go. Now what you need to do though, this is still not tall enough. When you put it behind the fence, it's still not going to clear it correctly, so you still need to go a little bit further. So what we're going to do is have a couple pieces of thread stock, and I pre-measured these. You'll need to figure them out. In this case, they're just about one and three quarters inches long. If we're staying true to the metric here, I have to stay about four and a half centimeters right there. All right, now we're going to do the same thing. We'll put some thread lock on it. We'll thread that into the coupling nut. As you can see, I went a little heavy on the thread stock. Let's go ahead and cut another piece of this really quickly. All right, let's do that four and a half centimeters right there. We'll go ahead and put a mark there. We know we're going to cut right there. Let's go ahead and get that cut. All right, here we go. Let's go ahead and clean up that thread on the end. Just do a touch grind on it. All right, let's go ahead and use this second one. Thread that in. Okay, now what we're going to do to get the correct length on this is when we thread this down, that's going to leave the correct exposure length out sticking out. So we'll go ahead and just put a little bit of thread goo on here. All right, now you can see that the two don't line up exactly right. So what I do is go ahead and put that in the vise. Sure, it'll work the way it is right now. Let's make it look pretty. Here we go. And see if I can get a one-sixth turn out of this to line them up. Look at there. Okay, we now have the bolts. Let's install it on the fence and let's see how they work. Okay, now that we've made a pair of these right here with the appropriate length sticking out of the bottom of the nut, you're going to locate it on the fence here, making sure that you've lined up the capture nut below it in line. We're going to drop it in there and go ahead and spin that in place. And when you do, you can see it start to, there it goes. It's engaging right there. Let's leave that a little loose. We've already placed this one over here. Now you would go ahead and put your board on here. If you had a mark on where you wanted it, you would adjust the fence to where you wanted this to be. Now you can do this very easily across the top. Okay, and reach these very easily and place this and then loosen them. Move this out of the back here. No problem. It's a great improvement. Now, the only downside to this is, notice in certain positions, the handle may come out over the top of here. And if you're doing jigs or fixtures on here, that has to be taken account. But I do that so rarely. Having this everyday convenience to me is more important than having that other option. If you have a similar type of approach where you have actually improved the functionality of your drill press or shop-made fence, and you'd like to share it with your fellow viewers, do so in the comments below. And if you found this video to be helpful, won't you like it please? And better yet, like our channel, subscribe to it, and when you do, ring the bell so you'll get immediate notification when a video is put out approximately every Friday on great subjects around the house, the kitchen, trucks, tools, the shop, making projects, and the garden. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.