Rikon Drill Press Review

One of the great things about having the opportunity to go to woodworking shows is looking for cool new products. So I am here to take this opportunity to show you product I found at the recent show in Las Vegas 2015 AWFs. It was a great show. Here's what I'm talking about. What is it that caught my eye about this RIKON drill press? Well, let's look under the hood and I think you're going to be able to tell right away. What don't we see up here? Well, we don't see our step pulleys. So here's the deal; typically on a drill press, there's a series of step pulleys up here. And what that means is that when we change bit sizes, we get under the hood here to change RPM. Real question is how many people actually get under the hood and change the RPM? The answer is not many. What happens then is we're running drill bits at wrong speeds. That's not good. It affects the quality of your work. It affects the performance of the drill bit. So what RIKON did with this is they put a drive system in that allows us to control the speed on the fly and it's got a digital readout. So first thing let's turn it on. Here comes our digital readout. The speed control comes from a handle on the other side of the drill press here. We're at a low range right now, and we can dial that up and worked through the speed ranges without having to crawl under the hood and do any changes. What's the big deal with that? I've got a quarter inch pin in here right now. I've got veneered plywood. Let's go ahead and punch a hole at a low RPM. And look at that hole right away. You can see the fuzzing that we're getting in that veneer. Let's get to where we should be on the RPM. Well, the proof is in putting it right there. You got to have the right RPM to get good quality out of the hole that you're drilling. Now let's go in the other direction. When you go bigger, like a 4 star nut bit, then your RPMs have to come down. That is way too fast for this 4 star bit. Problem with keeping a big cutter at too high in RPM is that there's a good chance you're going to burn up the bit because it's running faster than it can cut. So we really want to run these at a low RPM. One of the things you might've noticed here is, look at how high I am above the table? But I was able to drill those holes. That's thanks to another cool feature of this drill press which is the length of the stroke. Look at the threaded rod that we've got here. This is a stop rod and we're going to talk more about that in a second. And let me take my force nut back out. Self store, the Chuck key, the reason I'm doing this is so that we can work through our travel very very long travel on this drill press, handy feature. Now come back to this because what I want to show you, I like this a lot, the quick release on our depth stop, what we can do is make gross adjustments by pushing in the button. Once we get close to where we need to be, you can do fine adjustments by just turning that on the thread. So this is so much easier to do than some kind of a double nuts system like some drill presses have. Onboard light so we can see our work while we're drilling it. A lot of great features built into this drill press, and that's why it caught my eye in the show.