Thread: New Nova Viking Drill Press - Initial thoughts and an old Stanley 803

Ok spoiler alert..... WOW mind you I am coming from a very low base as you can see in the photos.

I had sort of planned to use mini mill for doing accurate drilling work but whilst it can be done I found I milling cutters always in place and it became a chore to swap over to a drill chuck plus the nice keyless chuck cost some height so I went searching for a drill press with a key criteria of electronic speed control and no belts ..... and we arrived at the Nova Viking.

So I waited patiently for stock to arrive in AU and then a few more weeks of "really do I need this" till again got frustrated with the baby Ozito not being able to drill through 45mm of timber.

Kudos to Carbatec warehouse for shipping the drill and the jointer I also got on the same day, lucky I have a business drop point with fork lift so didn't need to have a tailgate service and the gear was delivered two days later on Wednesday.

I cleaned up some of the bench.
One of the measurements that is not in the spec sheets is the total height, with the motor on top you need around 1150mm from the bench.
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Son brought it around today still strapped done to the shipping pallet and we man handled it off his ute and onto an outfeed table to unpack.

It is basically in three parts, base, main unit and the table, plus all the various spanners etc you need. You get a FULL size printed manual making it easy to read. The AU units also ship with the chuck guard and out of the box the drill will not start without it connected. Glad it was in place for the first spin up as the chuck shed excess oil that didn't get wiped off initially. I would recommend installing it just for this.

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This thing is HEAVY and top heavy at that so whilst it is possible to do it yourself I would highly recommend one to hold the top in place whilst the bolts to the base are installed, it's pretty stable after that.
Out of the box the head unit was not square to the base, it wasn't even close and I would have expected it to be better but two set screws on the right hand side loosen the head assembly and it's quite simple to line up after that. Went a little bit high tech and used laser level to get it lined up, more because it was handy and quick.

I had read that others said the table and the chuck were not centered but at least on this shipment and my unit the drill chuck is exactly centered front to back on the table.
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That is a 8mm hardened steel shaft reclaimed from a high end printer and is near as damn perfectly straight and round.

Checking the table and spindle angles, the table was 90 deg to the rod out of the box, didn't have touch it at all.

If you spotted the dial indicator in the second photo yes I did do a run out check. The first check was just a quick dirty on the outside of the chuck and it had around 0.02mm and then my son pointed out the obvious that the outside of the chuck was hardly the place to measure it so we chucked up the 8mm shaft and measured against that.
The needle on the indicator moved...... so little we check it three times to ensure it was in the middle of the range .... I would call it effectively zero right at the chuck, we then measured at the other end of the shaft, well past the 100mm distance in the spec sheet and got back to 0.02mm of runout on the shaft itself.
Those readings never changed regardless of the spindle speed.
We got perversely curious about this time and decided to repeat the exercise on the old Ozito..... the less said about the widely swinging needle about this time the better

So what don't I like. Quite honestly the only thing i'm not liking yet is the sheer height, i wouldn't give up the chuck the table, chuck to base distances to lower it but may serious consider building a dedicated base unit that drops the whole drill unit down 150/200mm, guess i like looking down rather than across.

The cross laser seems to be correctly centred but i'll check that better when i get a chance with a small spot drill.

I have yet drilled anything yet and suspect that i'll build a top for the table as a priority.

Just before we unloaded this from the ute, my son hands me the Stanley hand drill from a crate of "junk" he had been given for recycling and says merry christmas

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I thought if made a good time line contrast photo, the old with the uber new high tech and classic belt drive tech in the back
The Stanley No 803 seems to be in good nick and even had about a 2mm drill bit in it so seems to have been used right up to going in the crate.

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Summary: I do not regret spending the dollars and looking forward to using the Nova Viking. The cool techno features have been covered in the various youtube reviews so they have covered it.

I'll add notes to this as I use this to drill some holes in things, one of the first will be 6mm holes in 32mm tubing for pool steps, have the jig half made for this task.