I had a Bosch PBD 40 for a very long time, which I decided to give up a few months ago, and made a decision of buying a better and much heavier bench drill machine. My vote for the new machine fell on a Güde GTB 16/500 Vario, which seemed to be a good alternative at a reasonable price. I don't have a lot of space in my "workshop" so a floor model was out of the question. Basically, the machine has almost everything I liked in the PBD 40 but it is more robust, precise and rigid. It is also taller, so I can work with larger stuff with it also. The other advantage compared to the PBD 40 is that this one has an MT2 quill, which makes it optimal for lighter milling work also, where the highest precision is not needed. Of course, some changes are needed before using it as a mill, not just adding an ER collet chuck, but those changes are made already, and I am actually using it as a mill, milling not only aluminium, but also steel. I will show the changes I made regarding that subject later on.
Anyway, one thing this machine did not have compared to the Bosch PBD 40 was a digital Z depth indicator, so the quill down movement had to be measured and set manually. I really appreciated that feature before, so already when I bought this machine I made a decision of adding that, which seemed to be a simple thing to do. Also quite early after I bought this machine, I bought a cheap XY compound table, but that table is really very bad, the screws have a lot of play and the backlash is really huge on both X and Y, so positioning is really difficult. This made it necessary to either buy a much better compound, which would be very expensive, or spend a countless number of hours on improving this, or at least to add DRO on both X and Y to enable accurate positioning. The first two were not an option because in that case I might as well buy a much better real mill, which I don't want to do for now. However, adding a DRO on both X and Y seemed simple, so off I went, ordered three different ones, one using aluminium scale for the Z, and two stainless steel for the X and Y, the X longer than the Y and sadly the seller sent me different types, which I complained about and that resulted in 50% refund, so it's fine for me, I don't care that the X and Y looks different. Anyway, last week I had some time available and made the final installation. I also made a short video about it, so lean back and enjoy.
https://youtu.be/jUsEznFB1i4