Homebrew PCBs

I made a pivoting type manual drill press. The drill motor is 
fixed to the end of 500 mm long arm which pivots at its end by 
two thrust bearings (from an old car clutch) that sandwich the 
50x50mm (3 mm wall) square aluminium arm. The difficult part is 
mounting the motor to the end of the arm, because you want it 
adjustable for alignment of the vertical feed and get it 
perfectly parallel. If anyone is interested I will get some 
photos and make them available online.

The advantage of this technique is almost zero side to side play 
without the need of precision linear bearings. You can safely use 
  0.45mm carbide drill bits, the smallest size drill I own.

The disadvantage is the extra bench space required for the long 
arm, which is fixed to a large heavy base like a slab of 18 mm 
MDF particle board. I usually have the habit of over engineering 
my home brew stuff and probably could of made it half the size.

Adam

Stefan Trethan wrote:
> i thought of manual drill press, moving the pcb with your hand.
> 
> i know there are such devices sold especially for this task and they are qite expensive.
> but i'm sure it is possible to get a drill press working properly without these special bearings.
> if you limit the minimum diameter to 0,8 or 0,6 millimeter.
> 
> 
> i was wondering how the guys here do the drilling which don't hava a x/y drill cnc machine.
> 
> regards
> stefan
>