I've been looking for discussions about automating a manual drill press (via a stepper- or servo motor controlled X/Y table for the workpiece, with a belt drive or direct drive on the quill), but so far I haven't found much.
Most of the threads about CNC'ing a drill press are aimed at turning the DP into a milling machine (or strongly advising against doing so), however that's not my goal. I want to do drilling, not milling.
It occurred to me that one possible approach would be to obtain an X/Y table from a Sieg X2 mill (either the standard one or the bigger one from Little Machine Shop), and doing a CNC conversion on the table exactly as you would do it for the mill. That would leave the quill drive as the remaining problem to solve, but it would probably be possible to find a suitable drive system that has been used successfully on a mill/drill and convert it to work on the DP.
I could probably live with the X2 table size restriction (although it might be nice to have more Y-axis 'headroom' than the X2 tables offer) - in fact, maybe I can even find someone who has a spare X2 table after replacing it with the larger one from LMS - but I wonder whether there might be some other options that people have tried.
I'm also wondering what options might be available for changing drill bits more quickly than removing the old one and inserting the new one using the standard chuck and key.
My DP is the Harbor Freight 39955 "monster"...
Pointers to example DP conversions would be welcomed...