Instant Drill Press Depth Stop

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. We have produced several episodes about this great drill press from Powermatic. It is a wonderful drill press, and you'd think for all the features that it has, there'd be nothing that you could improve. Well, there's one little thing I want to point out to you, and that's the depth stop. And I'm going to show you an enhancement on how to take it from this manual type like this to an instant adjustable system. Stay tuned. Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. If you have a drill press, you know how valuable they are in the shop. And they have great features depending on the kind that you have, what it's used for as a maker, whether you're using it for metalworking or whether it's set up like this as a woodworking type of drill press. Well, it has several great features, but one of the areas that I find to be challenging is the depth stop. Now, a depth stop is simply a column that's usually threaded that has an area that allows you to come down. And once you hit that, the depth of drill is always going to be the same or whatever device you've got on the end of the chuck here. So you can adjust this up or down. I can take this down, screw it down here. But you can see it takes a while to get these opposing nuts. You have a nut here on the bottom, a little washer between it, and then a top one when you oppose the two of them. Now that locks into there every time, dependably. Feels good. It's very sound. But you just saw the disadvantage. It takes a lot of time rolling this up and down. Now, there's another thing here. If you're going to use this as just a stop to hold this right into position where I'm going to put, let's say, a drum sander on it or some other device I want for this to stay right at that position, then I need to take the bottom one. As you can see, I need to thread it up and lock it on both sides of the stop block right here. And now it'll stay right there where it needs to be. But again, you just saw the disadvantage. I have to manually undo this or thread it up and down. And to be honest with you, many times when I'm starting to lower this more, this right there, it'll jam a little bit because this is sitting on top of there. And you end up kind of going like this. And there's some times with machine vibration that these two get locked together in such a way that finger pressure or hand pressure can't take them apart. And you end up having to go get a pliers and a piece of tape or something so you don't mess this up and get these apart. What to do? Well, there's an easy kind of off-the-shelf solution that's called a push button nut. Now, let me show you what that looks like. Here is one right here. This is made by Morton. I bought this from Progressive Industries. You can see the website and the cost, which was about $15 for this, in the description below. And these nuts are made up out of three different parts. Let's walk through them. There's your outer part right here. As you can see, it needs to be quite sizable to house everything. But there you have the outer size, which you could put a large wrench on. You won't need it for this application. You have a spring that sits in the bottom like that. And then you have this piece right here, which is the button. Now, this side is the button, but if you see right on the top, it's threaded right in there. And if I reverse this away, it's smooth on this side. So, it has threads on one side. And in this case, to match my drill press, you'll need to figure out what yours is. I needed to get an M16, a metric set, the thread pitch to be right to match the threads that are on this. When I put this back together, what I now have is a push-button system. And even though this isn't the way I'm going to use it, you can see if I did put it on the stem right up here, it locks in right wherever I put it. So, I can come up a little bit. It'll lock right there. It's instantaneous. So, to make use of this, I need to remove these nuts, get rid of this one, unless I want to just use just for a depth stop and get that replaced with this right here. All right, let's tear into it. So, the first thing you need to do is remove this down here. In my particular setup, this is going to take a 14 millimeter, just simple wrench. This is really pretty simple here. And again, if you're only replacing the top, you don't need to do this. If you're going to leave this intact, only thing you'll need to do is remove these and then slide the nut down on top. But I'd like both the depth adjustment on this end as well as up here. So, once I can take that off, I've got this. I'm going to drop off the nut, the lock washer, and now I need to screw this down to the bottom. I'm going to go ahead and start to lift this out. And when I do, now I need to lower the whole thing down, continue that path up, and now I can pull it this way and take off the bottom nut. Now I can lift this out. And when I do, now I can go ahead and remove everything on it and start again. Now I have the threaded column on this side here. You can see the threads here. These are approximately, I believe the pitch on this is a thread every two millimeters. Common tooling is a thread every one and a half. In this case, for this setting, they did one every two millimeters. And you order it per whatever your depth stop is if you have this kind on your make of drill press. All right, so now what we need to do is we're going to go ahead and lower this down. And I'm going to go ahead and hold this other side with my elbow. I'm going to go ahead and put on the nut here. Now it's in place. As you can see, I can adjust that up and down immediately just by pressing and letting go. So now we need to reinstall this under here. So we're going to go ahead and put the nut and the lock washer back in. Easy peasy. Even though it has a lock washer, if you like, you might want to put some thread lock on it. You can certainly do that. All right, so that is where it needs to be here. So what I'm going to do to make this easy, I'm going to go ahead and raise that up. You can see it's stopped. Now I could raise it, take that all the way down here, go like that, and it stays right where it's going to stay. So very quick. I'm going to go ahead and do that. Now let's go ahead and install the second one. You can see right there, here's the descriptions and everything from Progressive Industries, their part number, everything that's in the description below. We're going to take it out there. And as you can see, there's a little liner in the center to keep everything set up. And now we're going to go ahead and place that right over the top. I put the buttons out at that angle, and there you have it. Now I'm going to go ahead and lower this all the way down, so it allows me a maximum travel. Now I can put this anywhere I want to stop instantaneously. Pretty spiffy, huh? Now, are there any downsides to this? Well, cost is not bad. This is about $35 all set, including tax to get it here. Progressive Industries doesn't charge any freight, at least at the time when I ordered this. And so that's not a big deal. There are two little things you should be aware of that may be a trade-off for you. Number one, this nut height is significantly higher than a single one of these. Or if I put a double on here, it's about the same. But you're going to lose some of the depth or range of stop by having that double here and you won't have quite as much here. But you know, I tend to adjust within a very narrow range, so I don't see that to be a bad trade-off. Now, the next thing you need to be aware of, you're going to have to come and look over my shoulder to see what I'm talking about. Do you notice here on this nut right here, because of its bulk, that it consumes the space between the threaded column and the main housing right here? Therefore, I cannot turn this nut any way. Can't do any portion of a turn. So if I need to fine adjust, let's say, a half a turn to get that precisely where I need to be, you can't do it. It might be able to work under your drill press, but on mine, I can't turn it. So there is a tooth every two millimeters. So that means I can adjust this up and down in two millimeter increments by letting it go. And you can see it click in. See right there? I went, okay, it's locking in almost every time. Yep. So I've got two millimeters at a time. You're going to have to make up your mind of whether or not those two things put this out of the running as a potential enhancement for your drill press. Well, if you have a tip like this that you found to be helpful in enhancing this type of tooling in your shop, won't you share it in the comments below? And if it is something that we end up doing an episode about, I'll make sure to give you the credit for it. But in the meanwhile, if you found this to be helpful, won't you like this video? And better yet, please subscribe to our channel. And when you do, ring the bell, because then you'll get notified approximately every Friday of a great new episode about the home, the shop, the kitchen, truck life, or just general product review about great products that you and I use around the home and the garden. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay with a newly adjustable drill press.