Spring cleaning

and introducing an old friend

[ soundtrack : Locomotive - Thelonious Monk ]

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There is spring in the air in old Oslo; you can feel a bit of warmth from the sun, and it’s weeks since the temperature dipped below zero at night. No green shoots yet, but not long now … not long now.

This means that it’s time to do a spot of spring cleaning in the workshop, but only a spot, mind! I’ve decluttered my drilling bench and vacuumed up the small debris that collects in the nooks and crannies. That’ll do.

I’d like you to meet one of my oldest workshop companions:

A drill stand made by AEG — it’s been with me for over thirty years now; providing sterling service without fail or trouble, and still as good as new. In our age of general enshittification, of how many other products can you say the same?

It was one of the first pieces of workshop equipment I bought when I set out, together with my bench, a contractor’s table saw and a Creusen bench grinder. To begin with I had it mounted in the middle of a long (wide) strip of stiffened plywood that I could clamp fast on my workbench when I needed to drill some holes. You often need to drill rows of holes in thin strips of wood/trim, so it makes sense to have a long, adjustable fence running past your drill stand.

As my workshops grew larger, I could afford to mount this long drilling table on brackets on the wall. Here you can see it behind my big spindle moulder:

Today it lives on my drilling bench, together with the awful green Bosch and the Jet hollow chisel mortiser. They share a similar form factor and so can be easily integrated into the same bench-top.

Notice the long slots in the ‘under-table’ — they’re for the clamps

In daily use, I clamp a sacrificial scrap of veneered MDF on top of the supporting ‘beams’, together with a straight & square stick of wood that serves as a fence. Very simple, very functional — no need to complicate things.

This simple, little drill stand is quick to set up and adjust, and has an equally simple and accurate depth-stop. This is a very useful feature for making precise countersinks so your screws will seat consistently and look neat:

A drawback when using a handheld drill mounted in a stand like this is that your average drill has too little torque at low revs when using big-diameter Forstner bits or plug-cutters. Nothing beats a proper pillar drill (the woodworking machine) for that kind of work, but for pre-drilling and counter-sinking for normal, furniture-sized hardware, the smaller drill press is perfectly adequate, and usually nimbler in use.

The advantages of a drill press are perpendicularity, repeatable precision and depth control, and if you use stopper-blocks you can save a bit of time on laying out; you only need to mark up the first item of the batch, set your limits accordingly and the stopper-blocks positions your work-piece for you.

Here, I needed to make a sliding slot for a bolt and a washer. Mind your ears!

Manual dust-extraction :-)

Even mundane things like stopper-blocks can be improved — here’s how!

Spring is here!

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