I'll have to look in to the conversion process you're talking about. I'm not afraid to try things and learn, but I'm not an electrician by any means. Anything I do with electricity involves me reading a lot before I even walk out the door to get started.

Counterbore vs countersink

Why do you need to DRILL a 1.5" hole? You can MILL (with rotary table) or BORE a hole any size, it just takes a little more time. How often will you need a hole over 1"?

Spotface vs counterbore

So then I read that mills aren't really designed to drill holes and it's kinda hard on them. Now maybe it's not gonna cause problems on a Bridgeport but maybe it will on a Chineese one? So then I see that Grizzly makes mill/drill type machines. I figure for starting out, maybe that's the way to go. If it's a mill/drill machine I would assume it's not hard on it to drill holes with it? and I haven't looked too closely at the specs yet but I assume you can go pretty slow with them. Some of them have powerfeed I see. I wouldn't have to search through auctions to find tooling. I could get parts easily too I would imagine. Maybe it wouldn't be the most precise machine, but it would be decent for learning I would think. If I got one of the combination machines could I pull off 1.5" holes without making the bit smoke? What do those of you who are a little further along in the journey think of that thought process? Thanks.

Counterbore hole dimensions

I've never run into a guy with a mill that said, "Boy, I sure wish I had bought a drill press."Have run into some with drill presses that have said, "Sure wish I had a mill instead of this drill press."I have read that you aren't supposed to use the power downfeed on the mill for much bigger bits than 5/8". Drilling with hand feed imposes no such limits and I've used the power feed to drill up to 1" with a twist drill if I'm just enlarging a pilot hole. Real machine shops put a power feed on the Z axis and drill big holes that way to avoid stressing the power feed gear train. For 99% of big holes, I use bi-metal holesaws  and a shop vac to keep filings out of the groove and provide cooling from the air flow from the vac.As for drilling or milling into the table: There are relatively few times that I bolt the workpiece to the table to drill. 99% of my drilling gets set on parallels and clamped in the vise that stays pretty much permanently attached to the mill's table. I have a decent quality imported drill chuck that gets used for drilling with twist bits.

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A mill can drill holes it is not hard on them. I have 2 mills an old "junk" one and a newer one. The old one will not hold machine shop tolerances but for a farm it is good and better then a drill press. The bigger the table the better. Stay away from J head mills. These are the ones with the round pipe on top. Bigger holes use a hole saw would be best.

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Counterboring Tool

I've been looking at a drillpress. I would like to be able to drill holes as large as 1.5" which means I need realy slow speed. Seems like it's hard to find a new drill press with less than 210 RPM until you get up into the Ellis range ($2,500 or so?).

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Counterbore Bit

I haven't had terrible luck drilling over 1" with regular twist bits. It just takes a lot of time because all of our drills turn too fast so we dull the bit just about as often as we drill a hole. I imagine if we had a good press it would go well, but maybe not.

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We drill over 1" probably 2 or 3 times a year is all. On each occasion we're likely drilling between 2 and 10 holes and it's frequently in 3/4" to 1" thick steel. I did not know about any other method for making a hole in 1" plate besides a drill. After going through this thread I've learned that a magnetic drill with annular bits should work well and that a mill with a rotary table would work well. I don't know what the difference between boring and drilling is. I'll have to look that up. Thanks for the thoughts.

I have a hard time being excited about paying $2,500 for just a drillpress. So I start looking at used mills. I find that I don't know enough about them to know what I'm looking at so I don't know if it's worn out before I get it or not. Then I think, heck, I'm just starting and I'm looking for a drillpress, not a mill. Why don't I just go with a Chinese one to learn on and then if I upgrade later I'll know better what I'm looking at. It's not like I'll be machining stuff to within .001 on it when I'm really just after a drillpress.