Machining a groove in wood

Router bits have a parallel shank and you can grip them in your drill chuck easily enough. Router speeds are higher though, so you'll find you'll have to go slowly so as not to be forcing the work along. You'll usually find that you can set the stop to prevent the bit being lowered too far and once down, you can lock the quill of the drill to stop it retracting too - on cheap drills the latter is usually just a grubscrew in the casting.

SteveW

drills hate side forces on the bearings

Do it with a saw.

NT

You could drill the bulk of it out with say a 5mm drill, then tidy it up with a router bit/saw/chisel. That would be less stress on a router bit in the drill if you go down that route.

Have you got a circular saw? Two cuts to the correct depth and chisel out the waste.

I don?t care. It?s a cheap pillar drill that hardly gets any use. As long as the bearings last long enough to one decent cut that?ll do me.

No suitable saw.

I was wondering about a milling bit. Maybe something like this?

A drill's bearings are not going to be noticeably affected by small amount (especially a one off) of routing. If he were looking at light milling work, in metal, on a frequent basis, the advice would be very different!

SteveW

You may well ruin the drill.

Drills aren't designed for force to be applied 'side on', routers are.

You could drill a series of holes and then try to a 'make shift' router. That would reduce the side on force.

An alternative is plough plane, if you can't borrow a router.

Nothing in principle to stop you using a router bit in the drill with suitable fence etc clamped in place to guide the work. The max speed on the drill press will be *significantly* lower than a typical router (20k rpm would be good for that size of cutter), so you will have to feed the work very slowly and take it easy on what is quite a small cutter. I would suggest using a two or three passes to get to the full depth.

Do you have a 5mm wide wood chisel ?. If so cut a slot manually

Any saw will do the job.

Do the sides with a stanley knife first

Bill

If you are a DIYer what are you doing without a circular saw? Aldi have two on offer one at £49.99 and one at £59.99, they are probably cheap and cheerful but will probably do a better job than any solution using a pillar drill as a router. You never know you might even find some uses in other jobs :).

Richard

A usable router can be had for even less!

quite

Skip the Aldi tools, get a machine mart / Clarke for the same price. Much better. I've had too many failures with Aldi stuff.

NT

I've got an Aldi battery circular saw - superb. And as mentioned elsewhere, ideal for this sort of job when used with a decent guide/saw board etc.

The problem with Aldi power tools is the very high failure rate.

NT

I've several Lidl/Aldi power tools. The only failures are batteries - 2

But they're only used for DIY. While the impact driver managed 200+ screws the other day to assemble a shed on one battery and didn't miss a beat, I'm not sure I'd trust them for daily use. And the better Bosch and Makita are nicer to use.

making a nice straight groove is not easy in inexperienced hands. I'd use a circular saw and make multiple parallel cuts and clean up with a chisel.