DIY PCB Driller

After leaning how to make PCBs by Toner Transfer , i was faced with another problem : drilling the PCBs. The only thing available for drilling in the market was a stupid hand driller. It was terribly slow and was not at all convenient to work with. And i really couldn’t afford those huge 500$+ PCB drillers. So , i decided to hack the hand driller and make a small motor driven driller for myself. I did this long back , so i dont really have much documentation of how i did it . Anyway ,I’m posting some pictures in the hope that it might be useful to some other hobbyist . This was the final product :

My Mini PCB Driller

The motor which I’ve used is a 12V DC motor which is used in Inkjet printers. I got that motor for ~100 Rs (2$) from SP Road in Bangalore. The semi-transparent cylinder which connects the motor to the drill head is the part of a funnel which i cut. The Drill head is taken directly from a hand driller. The motor rotates pretty fast at 12V. The torque is also reasonably good. I generally power it up at 6V as it rotates at a more manageable speed then. (This is a bad engineering practice though, i should actually have used PWM to reduce the speed). It can also drill through acrylic. Here is a close up of the drill head :

Drill Head Close up

The drill bit tends to break if it becomes loose or if u apply too much pressure. But that’s really not a very big concern as drill bits are not very expensive. I am now planning to make a * proper* setup with proper alignment for the driller and PWM speed control. Here’s a video of the driller drilling into an acrylic sheet :

Thats all for now , PS : Please do leave comments if you like my blog

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