Curious about the purpose. Care to expand?
I do general shop tinkering, wood, and metalwork as a hobby. Drilling wood requires a pretty high drill bit speed to get a smooth surface finish, but drilling metal requires a very slow speed (and a lot of torque) to avoid melting/dulling the drill bit too fast. I have a $50 benchtop drill press that I bought new a while back, and I have done far more than it was designed to do with it, but it suffers from some design flaws: the motor is too weak, the head casting is too light (and thus not rigid, which is bad for drilling metal), and the quill has too much runout so it is hard to get a good surface finish especially when countersinking weird stuff (like acrylic or steel). I recently picked up a used floor-standing drill press for a good price; it's an old Craftsman so it should be better designed. It had been destined for the scrap heap, but the guy I bought it from bought it from the scrapyard, fixed a couple of issues, and retrofitted a washing machine motor onto it since the original motor and pulley had already been scrapped. Pulleys are ridiculously expensive; a VFD and 3-phase motor is more pricey still but gives me a torque upgrade and even more speed variability (along with the ability to program some more esoteric things, such as a mode for power tapping).
