Three winters ago I went to a model machine show in Pennsylvania. In one of the shows selling lots was a Atlas drill head that I bought for $20 for the Drill Mill. That winter I started on the build process. I had to come up with a plan on mounting a post for the drill head.

A friend Dave West, gave me a old drill press that the head was bad. I took the column base to see if it would fit the Atlas drill. It was a little large so we tried to cut it down on a lathe. The metal was sand cast and had a lot of voids in it. Trying to cut it down to size, the lathe bit went right through the sides. So we were pretty well sunk at that point. I then went to see if I could find a thick wall pipe to use but every thing comes in standard sizes and would not work. By chance there was a old retired machinest from the national guard. He had the correct piece of column from some old equipment. Yey!!!!! I then took the base and bored it to the right size to fit the new column. The next step was putting the base on the milling table. I used a piece of metal plate and machine the exact holes for the column plate. I also had to build the motor plate and used some stainless rod for the mounts.

Next I built a heavy duty table for it.

Here is a set of pictures building the Mill Drill:

Two of the handles were missing and some of the supply houses have them in stock but pretty high. So I made my own, here is a picture showing the new handles:

Here is the finish product, it seems like I use this machine all of the time. Hope you enjoy looking at it.