There is a silly gotcha with this pillar drill: the travel is very short, and it’s easy to have hit the end of the travel before you realise. This sounds stupidly obvious, but remember this when you think “the drill bit must be blunt” / “the underneath of this material is hardened” / or any other random thought when it’s not drilling down any more.
If you need to change drill bits while drilling out the same hole, you’ll find the different lengths of drill bits are problematic and it seems you’ll need to move the bed up and down. You can often get away with keeping the bed where it is (and so aligned on your hole) but opening the chuck right out and getting the bit out at an angle.
If there is a better pillar drill down the line, though, much longer travel would be something to look for. It wastes a lot of time moving that bed up and down. I have a friend who has the same model and he independently expressed this thought to me.
Your talking about a proper floor standing pillar drill.
All the motor and engineering forums say to get an old british one and replace the motor if neccesary.
3 phase motors are prefered though for power.
Then you might have something that can drill straight without the runout of these cheaper modern machines.
Runout is possibly the reason they keep travel down to 50mm? Along with the strange-to-me concept of how thick a piece of material a drill can go through: surely if you male a hole and clear it out then you’re just starting a new hole?
Most of the cordless drills in the space don’t rotate truly on axis. I think the Blue Bosch is the best?