William Addison
10-26-2008, 10:49 PM
I've been looking for a new drill press for several months and looked at Delta, SC, and several others. I wanted a heavy press with step pulleys because I've always had trouble with VS presses sooner or later. I was considering the 17 in Grizzly when I saw that for $75 more I could get the 20 inch.
The machine arrived in about three working days without damage and it has about .003 runout and is dead smooth. The only problem was that the light did not work and in order to fix it I had to remove the pulleys wiring, and pulley cover which was a pain but no big deal. After tracing the wiring, I found that one wire had been nutted wrong and that part of it was an easy fix. In disassembling as much of the machine as I did I was very impressed with the quality. There were things like rubber washers between the pulley cover and the head and extra insulation on the wires where they were in contact with wire clips. The only thing I found that was cheesy was the 1 1/2 inch nut that secures the front pulley was plastic but it doesn't do anything except secure the pulley.
This is a lot of drill press for the money and I can say I am a lot more impressed with the condition of the machine on arrival, the manual and parts list, and the tech support than I was with my MM16 which is a high end machine.
The machine arrived in about three working days without damage and it has about .003 runout and is dead smooth. The only problem was that the light did not work and in order to fix it I had to remove the pulleys wiring, and pulley cover which was a pain but no big deal. After tracing the wiring, I found that one wire had been nutted wrong and that part of it was an easy fix. In disassembling as much of the machine as I did I was very impressed with the quality. There were things like rubber washers between the pulley cover and the head and extra insulation on the wires where they were in contact with wire clips. The only thing I found that was cheesy was the 1 1/2 inch nut that secures the front pulley was plastic but it doesn't do anything except secure the pulley.
This is a lot of drill press for the money and I can say I am a lot more impressed with the condition of the machine on arrival, the manual and parts list, and the tech support than I was with my MM16 which is a high end machine.