My new pillar / bench drill

[A_Camera]

One thing my new bench drill machine did not have, compared to the Bosch PBD 40, was a digital Z depth indicator, so the quill down movement had to be measured and set manually. I really appreciated that feature before, so already when I bought this machine I made a decision of adding that, which seemed to be a simple thing to do. Also quite early after I bought this machine, I bought a cheap XY compound table, but that table is really very bad, the screws have a lot of play and the backlash is really huge on both X and Y, so positioning is really difficult. This made it necessary to either buy a much better compound, which would be very expensive, or spend a countless number of hours on improving this, or at least to add DRO on both X and Y to enable accurate positioning. The first two were not an option because in that case I might as well buy a much better real mill, which I don't want to do for now. However, adding a DRO on both X and Y seemed simple, so off I went, ordered three different ones, one using aluminium scale for the Z, and two stainless steel for the X and Y, the X is longer than the Y and sadly the seller sent me different types, which I complained about and that resulted in 50% refund, so it's fine for me, I don't care about that the X and Y looks different. Anyway, last week I had some time available and made the final installation and added DRO to the XYZ axis. I also made a short video about it, so lean back and enjoy. Here is the video about my solution.



If anyone is interested I can share the Arduino file.