Bosch PBD 40 Workshop Bench Pillar Drill

Lee 30/07/2014 18:50:52

I use the drill for boring pieces of hard wood like ebony. It is really quite powerful and the head travel is excellent... What gives this drill an advantage for me is the fact that apart from the 90mm travel, if you release the stop, the head will continue down, giving you the ability to drill from the top of the column to the bed. The gap is surprisingly large... It looks quite small in the pictures but i have a compound slide table with a tilting vice fitted and i can still fit a forstner bit and drill through 100mm pieces of wood. The digital depth gauge is very useful. my only gripe is that the head is not completely rigid and will move from side to side slightly. When drilling metal, a spot drill guide is essential. It definately does more than any other pillar drill in the price range.

Russell 14/07/2014 11:54:42

Just what i wanted it does all i need it to do and more. very pleased with service, as always, and very pleased with item

G 13/07/2014 11:27:21

Great service from tooled-up, quality product from bosch.

Deckboy 30/01/2014 07:18:39

As mentioned by others the laser is inaccurate, so therefore pointless. (i don't know if you can adjust it.) the clamping bracket tends to fall to the table when you remove the workpiece and can get a bit stuck, requiring a bit of a fiddle to lift it. A thin plastic collar at the base of the pillar would correct this. I tied a bit of earth sleeve around mine. The drill bit does wobble a bit, but for my level of skill it was ok. The actual operation of the drill is good, with the digital depth gauge being useful.

Colin 07/11/2013 09:20:58

Too early to tell as i have just started using it - impressed so far.

Shiuming 20/06/2013 00:28:51

After seemingly endless research and reading a lot of mixed reviews on this particular drill, i bit the bullet as i needed a solution quickly and the overall concept appealed to me. first of all it was much cheaper than anywhere else, the ordering process and delivery were very straightforward and pleasant. in the box, the product is nicely presented and i was able to set it up and start using it immediately without reading the instructions. So far i have not bothered to make use of the electronic depth guage, still preferring to mark a depth stop on the bit with some coloured tape. the laser is a gimmick, the lines simply aren't fine enough and you should always bring the bit down to the workpiece to align and mark it. Likewise the two white led lights only light the workpiece from one side, not good if the workpiece is not totally flat and they are also not very bright. it has a röhm chuck, which at close inspection appears to be much more precisely made than the jacobs 4000 chuck on my bosch psb 850-2 re and pretty much every chuck on a hand held drill i've seen in the consumer-oriented market. The jaws have a more sharply machined appearance and close together perfectly on my unit. By eye, the trueness appears better too. I've lost enormous amounts of sleep reading about chuck wobble on drills but one thing i have recently discovered is that none of my drill bits are perfectly straight either. Simply rolling them on a flat surface is not enough to tell, as most of them are off by a tiny amount that won't be noticed until trying to drill a precise hole. that brings me to the next point i found of concern, namely complaints of lateral play. Whether by design or not, it probably helps more than it hinders, given my experience of bits never being perfectly straight either. If there was no lateral movement at all, smaller bits would snap sooner than later.