My drill press features the "lift it up and down with your hand"
method for adjusting the table height. This got old after a
while, especially with a vise or a heavy workpiece on the table, so I started looking for a way to add a counterweight to
make the process easier.
The best setup I found on the internet had a cable running up from
the back of the table, over a pulley at the top of the column and
then down inside the column to the counterweight itself. Unfortunately, I couldn't
make this work on my drill press because the motor mount
was in the way of the cable. There was also no really good way to
attach a cable to the back of the table.
I eventually figured the next best thing would be to have pulleys
just below the drill press head with the counterweight riding
outside of the column. The pictures show how I did it.
The bracket that holds the pulleys is made of red oak, and clamps
to the drill press column with some long bolts. The axles for the
pulleys are 1/4-20 bolts that I just screwed into threaded holes tapped into
the oak.
I machined the pulleys themselves from high density polyethylene
(HDPE) scraps that I melted in an oven and then cast into a block
under pressure in a wooden mold. (That's another story altogether--
this YouTube video and the very first part of
this one show how to do it.) The HDPE plastic is kind of slippery, so I
didn't need any fancy bearings or anything to make the pulleys
work for this project.
The counterweights are simple wooden boxes with sand in them. I
adjusted the amount of sand in the boxes until the weight seemed
about right. In the end I think the whole assembly wound up
about three pounds lighter than the table.
I eventually figured the next best thing would be to have pulleys
just below the drill press head with the counterweight riding
outside of the column. The pictures show how I did it.
