Joe AutoDrill wrote:

I'm a bit confused about where the problem lies. What is controlling the
thrust? The drill press is supplying the rotation power and spindle, but
what is driving the spindle or heads travel / thrust? It would seem that
it would be separately controllable. Is it a travel per revolution
thing, and if so can you rework the drive ratio to that?

Gear head drill press. The RPM that the drills need to run at (maximum) is
too slow for the lowest feed rate the machine offers. They can't lower the
feed rate and can't speed up the RPM so they play with funny tooling to make
it work... but then the extra feed rate at the slow RPM causes a tremendous
load on the drilling head.

I'm waiting for photos / bad parts to know exactly what it is doing to the
bearings...

Ah, then the air cylinder retrofit sounds like the way to go. Constant
force vs. travel per revolution.