Drill Press Handles: Repairing a Craigslist Find

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I found this old drill press on Craigslist for a steal. My bench top drill press did not have the capacity needed to drill through the pepper mills I was turning so it was the perfect combination of need and opportunity.

The only problem with the drill press was that it only had one handle, and the holes for the other two handles were stripped out.There are lots of different ways this repair could have been made, or I could have happily gone along with only one handle.

But I decided to bore out and tap the holes for the next up size (1/2") and use threaded rod with a turned knob as the handle. I think the threads were stripped out because the original handles did not fit snuggly into the threads. That meant each handle pull was a mini impact against the threads and eventually they gave way. In effort to prevent that, I wrapped the end of my threaded rod with a healthy amount of teflon tape to make sure the threads fit snuggly with no wiggle.If I did this again one change I would make it turning larger knobs.