A few months ago I found in an antique store a vintage kit of drill attachments and tools. When you see them you will understand why I couldn’t resist buying the kit. The entire set of this multi-tool kit comes in a wooden cabinet, with all the attachments neatly arranged, and it also comes with the drill that was designed to power the tools.
These attachments mostly allow to convert the drill into various woodworking tools, some of which I was surprised at how well they work. It also comes with a couple of attachments that serve to cut, sharpen and grind metal. But the best part is that now I also have a couple of woodworking tools that I didn’t have in my workshop.
Making a circular saw with the drill
Installing a wood cutting disc on the drill does not seem like a good idea, but in this case an attchement was designed to transform the drill into an actual circular saw. So the drill works as it would work the electric motor of any circular saw.
It is basically a normal circular saw, but with the drill working as the electric motor. I was able to use it to cut wood without major problems, although the ergonomics are not the best. Of course, the cutting disc is old and leaves much to be desired, so it can certainly cause kickback more easily than a modern circular saw blade. The thing is that I don’t know if a drill is the most suitable thing to move a modern circular saw disc, so in principle I won’t use this saw to make any woodworking or DIY project with wood.
Table saw attachment
You already know that using a hand circular saw to make a table saw is a fairly typical project on YouTube. In this case, they designed an attachment that fits perfectly with the circular saw attachment for drill that we saw before.
I like how well everything fits together, including the miter gauge that fits and slides almost perfectly in the slot (something that doesn’t happen on the cheap table saws we can buy nowadays), I like that it comes with a riving knife behind the saw disc, and that it has a curious depth-of-cut adjustment system that moves the table saw top instead of lifting and lowering the circular saw blade. The problem is the same as the one I mentioned before about the cutting disc that we saw in the previous attachment.
Drill powered Jigsaw
The jigsaw accessory is a drill attachment that most woodworking hobbyists are already familiar with.
The drill is fitted in place, the blade is put in place (in this case it has an old system to anchor the jigsaw blade, so I had to search until I found the right ones) and the wood can be cut with this one woodworking and do-it-yourself tool.
The worst thing is that in the way I have to grab this jigsaw, it is difficult to handle. Very poor ergonomics compared to modern jigsaws.
Scroll saw
But the jigsaw we saw earlier, and this is the woodworking tool that surprised me the most out of all these drill attachments, serves as a base to become a scroll saw.
Yes, as you can see in the picture, there I have an electric scroll saw that cuts the wood really well. Well, when I say wood I mean veneers like 5 millimeter thick plywood or maybe a little more. But when I use it, I notice how the wood slides smoothly against the blade as it makes a clean and fast cut.
Grinder attachment for drill
After seeing the circular saw attachment that I showed at the beginning of this post, this drill powered grinder attachment may not come as much of a surprise. But I didn’t expect it, so I admit that I was surprised to discover it.
In this case, compared to the jigsaw, this tool is not so uncomfortable to handle, but it seems to me that the disc rotates in the opposite way than in normal angle grinders.
Drill powered orbital sander attachment
I was also surprised to find an attachment for mounting an orbital sander on the drill.
But it is not easy to handle. Sanding does sand the wood, but when using it, it is difficult to get it where I want it to go.
Lathe kit attachment for drill
I am making a simple wooden stand for this lathe in my workshop. Because I want to be able to get to work with it easily whenever I want.
A few years ago I showed you a drill lathe kit I had bought. But that lathe kit didn’t work very well. And the main reason why that lathe kit didn’t work well is because the drills usually have a little play inside the neck where the chuck is attached. The problem is that this play makes it impossible to keep the wood turning on a perfect axis, because when touching the workpiece with the gouges the play allows a displacement of the wood that makes the axis of rotation change slightly. It seems like a small thing, but the result when turning wood was horrible.
But the drill kit that comes with this multi-tool attachments kit does not have that play. In addition, the pieces are of better quality and solid. The best thing is that I can turn wood and get much better results. Surely a real lathe, even a cheap one, will work better, but I think that with this one I can already make some interesting work, or at least I can practice turning wood.
Drill powered disc sander
In my YouTube channel and in this blog we already saw how I made some homemade disc sander. Well, now I have another one :).
The lathe comes with enough parts to easily make a disc sander, a very useful tool for precision wood sanding.
Grinder attachment
Another curiosity was finding this attachment for mounting a grinder on the lathe.
One advantage of the lathe is that it serves as a good support for the drill, so this grinder mounts where the drill chuck would go. Of course, I had to visit a few hardware stores to find the right stone to fit the parts of this grinder. But having an excuse to go around visiting hardware stores is not a problem, is it?. Quite the contrary 🙂 .
Column drill stand
And the icing on the cake is to convert the lathe into a drill press. I had seen how to use the drill press as a makeshift lathe, but the other way around?
Mounting the drill vertically is not complicated, as the lathe kit easily converts to a vertical stand. But now the trick is to mount a simple table in the tailstock and move that table up and down, against and away the drill bit, to make it work like a drill press. And yes, as you can see in the video, instead of working by moving down and up the drill, what we have to do is to move up and down the table on which we put the workpiece. It is not the most comfortable way to work, but for some punctual jobs it is sure to be useful.
