Originally Posted by
Andrew Nemeth
I agree with most everything posted here. I started out with a drill press attachment and ended up with a freestanding hollow chisel mortiser. I don’t use the floor standing unit much, but since getting it, I’ve never put the attachment back on the drill press. I will say, the most important part of either a dedicated unit or the attachment is learning how to properly sharpen the tooling and setting the proper clearance between the chisel and the drill bit. Set up is a bit finicky for either, but much more so with the drill press attachment. Also without a proper fence, x-y table, and hold down, the drill press attachment is less efficient in use. Finally, my drill press doesn’t have the leverage needed to easily drive the chisel into very hard wood, even with very sharp tooling. I have used a cheater bar to lengthen a handle on the drill press but, if making a deeper mortise in the middle of a longer piece of wood, you can only extend so far before your handle starts running into your workpiece as I need to rotate the handles of my drill press quite a bit to get the quill to move up and down far enough to get to depth. There are work around a to this but, once again, they are cumbersome, and honestly, I’m not sure how good of an idea lengthening the handles of a drill press to gain enough mechanical advantage to properly drive a larger chisel into a harder wood.
However, if you would like to experiment, and it will fit your drill press, I’d be happy to send you my drill press mounted unit for nothing other than the cost shipping. IIRC, the only measurement that is critical to these attachments is the diameter of the ring that mounts it to the quill of the drill press. If I have any duplicate chisels I’ll send those too (although I may have already given those away). If you’re interested, just PM me the diameter of your quill, or the model of your drill press, and your address and I’ll drop it in the mail if it will fit your setup.
Now, just to be fair, I’ve tried to give this thing away multiple times with no takers. Either people don’t like me too much or the drill press attachments do not appear to be a hot item.