Product Review: Nova Voyager DVR Drill Press

I've been around tools for a really long time. And you look at something like a drill press and you say, well, what can you possibly do to a drill press to make it bigger, better, faster, stronger. And in all honesty, I get surprised every once in a while like I did here, this is the Voyager drill press from NOVA. And it's like the one of the smartest tools in the shop. It's kind of interesting all of the different things that they've done. So let's start with some of the kind of low hanging fruit some of the stuff that's really cool right off the bat. And then we'll get deeper and deeper and deeper into what the drill press is capable of. So, one thing that you might notice right away is that there's no hood to open on this machine. There's no belts to change. Speed changes are done with this dial right here. In addition to the speed change being done there the digital readout is telling us what the RPM are while. So why is that a big deal? What's cool about that? Well, if you've owned a drill press that's got step pulleys and a V belt I would ask how many times you actually get in there and change the speed depending on what you're doing. I think we all have a tendency to just kind of leave it on one speed and hope for the best. So, great flexibility here with that ability to really dial in the speed. The other thing is pretty cool. It's got a really long stroke on the quill. It's six inches, great depth of drill capacity there. Now, of course, we don't always wanna drill six inches. So another thing I really like is the way that we can wrap it, advance the stop can also finesse the stop, just very easy to use. Now, this is a mechanical step here. The drill press also includes a step within its smarts. And we'll talk about that a little bit in just a bit, very nicely set up there. So that's kind of some real easy to, conventional drill press features that compare to other drill presses but let's look at some stuff that this machine can do that other drill presses can't do. So this is gonna give us an opportunity to get inside the display. And before we look at depth, the drill let's go back one to this part of the display. This is cool when you're about to drill a hole and you wanna make sure that you're running at the correct speed based on what type of drill bit, what size of drill bit, what type of material we can choose this and once we've chosen this setting softwood, hardwood, acrylic, whatever it is it'll set the drill press to that speed. So that's pretty darn cool. Now, in this part of the menu, we can set the depth here. So one of the things I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna zero the drill press out. So it knows where the top of the material is. So what I'm doing right now, I'm kissing the drill bit down to the top of the stock and I'm gonna zero. So now the machine knows that that's the top of my material. Now we'll go back into our menu and here we can dial in what we wanna our depth of drill to be. So let's set that for 7/16s. Now, this is pretty cool. When I drill the hole, the machine is smart enough that when it gets to the right depth it's actually gonna come to a stop. The drill bit itself is gonna stop. So right at 7/16s that bit's simply stops running. Now, the other thing that's happening is that an audible beep is coming off of the drill press. And I can hear it as I approached the bottom. It's warning me that I'm getting to the bottom of the hole and it might be too subtle for you to hear on your end of this but it's coming out of the drill press head here. So again, that gives me a warning. I slow down my feed rate a little bit as I'm sneaking up on the bottom of the hole. So that's pretty cool. We can electronically set depth of hole. How about electronically starting the drill bit so ironically enough, it's called here. Self-start, turn that on. Come back to our menu. Now, watch what's gonna happen here when we drill the hole, as I approached the work, obviously the drill bit is not running now. I'm not gonna touch the on switch. As I approach the work, it turns itself on We drill the hole to our 7/16s depth. It stops. We come out cycle back to the top of the quill get to our next hole location, approach the work. So each time I do this, it's allowing me to just one handed one hand on the board one hand on the quill, handle this operation. Pretty cool stuff. Everybody knows that if you're gonna drill into round stock, you gotta center punch it first. So that the drill bit doesn't wander around on the surface before it starts drilling the hole unless you're doing that operation here, in this case, we're going through the menu. I'm on, what's now called the pilot setting. And that allows the drill bit to get started on my round stock. I haven't done any center punching on that conduit. What happens is we started a real low RPM get in the correct location, start drilling, and the drill press can tell by load when it's finish the pilot hole. And then it steps up to the higher RPM to complete the operation. So pretty cool saves you the center punching step on round stock. Let me walk you through some other functions. We can have a look at it here on the display, looking here look at that R-E-V. You can run the drill press in reverse that's part of our menu. It can, of course also turn that off. So that's handy. Now, the other thing is we can change our speed by turning the dial. And if I simply turn the dial, it's making real big changes. If I press the dial in and turn it, it's making finer changes or like buttons on a radio, we can also use presets And these presets can be edited within the menu. So if you have your own favorite numbers that you wanna put in there, you can do that a lot of pretty cool stuff on here. And another thing that I like a lot is that it's kind of breaking function. So I've got a massive drill bit in there right now a big Forstner bit. Let me get the speed, the right spot and run that and power down and watch how fast that Forstner comes to a stop , big massive drill bit. But with the electronic brake on there brings it to a stop really quickly, large table on this drill press. If you're a woodworker, you gotta love that. 'Cause we're working with carcass sides and that kind of stuff. Of course the table is capable of tilting so you can drill angle holes. Another thing that's pretty neat is what's called tap assist. If you've ever tapped a hole, you know that what you need to do is bring the tap in perfectly perpendicular to the surface, advance it then back it up to break the chip advance it back it up, advanced it back it up. You can actually do that whole operation right here on this drill press. So, if your drill press shopping, it's worth a look. If nothing else, this ability to change speed here with that dial instead of moving step pulleys around is really cool. And the electronic control that brings to the table is a great function. A lot of functionality added to the drill press. So the NOVA Voyager it's definitely worth a look if you're shopping for a drill press