The Crucible GoDrilla extends the reach of your drill bits (and other tooling) without introducing any run-out or wobble. This precision-machined tool (made in Tennessee) allows you to perform many unusual boring and fastening operations with immense ease and accuracy. Home center bit extenders are cheap, poorly made and are designed for operations where run-out is OK. An oversized hole will be hidden behind drywall. In most woodworking operations, however, an oversized hole is an ugly, gappy disaster.
So when we sat down to design a bit extender, we wanted a tool that:
- Holds a bit fiercely and concentric with the chuck
- Can be tightened by hand, but also can be cinched with wrenches when you need it to stay put
- Is able to extend the reach of a bit from 6” to 24”
- Is repairable if the shaft ever gets bent.
So we made one: The Crucible GoDrilla.
The GoDrilla works like a router collet, but with two ends. By tightening the steel nuts (knurled with flats for wrenches), one end grabs a hex bar that’s chucked into a drill. The other end of the collet grabs 1/4”-shank tooling. You can put anything you like in the collet, from a spade bit to a screwdriver bit to a countersink bit to anything with a 1/4″ hex shank.
It basically extends the reach of any of the thousands of tools that have a 1/4” hex shank.
The collet locks great with hand pressure. But you can make the bond unbreakable with 1/2″ wrenches.
The GoDrilla includes a 12″ length of hex bar – a common length for chairmaking – that is easy to swap out for whatever length you need. The body of the GoDrilla is made from hard-anodized aluminum. The nuts are steel and coated in manganese phosphate for rust protection and to lubricate the threads.
— Christopher Schwarz
Can I get one from you directly, if I’m Canadian?
Awesome. Love the dual tightening.
Would like to test it out on the abuse of a jobsite.
On a job site, I’d just use one of the cheap home center ones. This would be overkill for drilling studs.
This should be great. It’s important to get a tight grip on both the shaft end and the tip.
Come on, man
I can’t believe it!!!! I received e-mail at 4:41 and by 6:15 it was out of stock. All I have to say is you may need to ramp up production on this one. Not complaining just disappointed I wasn’t camp out on my e-mail box waiting on the announcement.
We have tons more in the works.
I’m on a once in 22 years family vacation, and saw this about midnight in London and told my wife, if I don’t order this now!…I’m praying the dog walker brings it in before it gets rained on back in the states.
Wow, out of stock already! Any idea when the next batch will be ready?
Nevermind—-I see the above response. Thanks!
Holy crap. That sold out fast!
😀
Bloody heck. I have been watching every day to grab this sucker and it’s already gone. Good for you guys! Looks like you caught lightning in a bottle. Ok back to chair making in the morning.
Are there any plans or thoughts on eventually extending (pun intended) the GoDrilla family to include a tapered square shank brace adapter to go on the extender shank side, and/or larger models to fit e.g. 9 mm hex shanks (like you get on the larger size Star-M F-type drill bits) or even the 11 mm hex shanks on e.g. the WoodOwl auger bits?
I do of course perfectly understand if that would be too much of a muchness for Crucible, or if you just don’t think there’s enough of a market out there to warrant the time and money you’d have to spend. ‘Cause sure, there are already brace-to-hex adapters out there in various sizes, but at least the ones I’ve seen have been considerably below Crucible levels of quality, while for the WoodOwl augers, you can always get the 18″ ones, but those they don’t exactly give away for free … so a widened GoDrilla range would, I think, kinda fill a niche rather neatly.
Cheers,
Mattias
What are the specifications for the hex rod you use? Found 1/4″ across the flats stainless – annealed. That’s too big. Does annealed work? Or don’t worry about temper?
1/4″ width across the flats is correct.
It is 1215, which is ideal for couplings such as this. https://www.mcmaster.com/4416T61/
We also experimented with other steels such as 420, which was overkill.
You said in the video at about 1min:49sec, but I think it bears writing in the text the minimum bore (5/8″) diameter through which the GoDrilla will pass.
For down-the-road ideas, I’ll echo Mattias Hallin’s request for future variants that accept the Wood Owl TriCut et al, hex shank and/or an adapter to the classic auger tapered square shank. (I know, I know. Y’all’ve broken your backs developing this initial version…)
Probably heresy to say this, but I’m eagerly awaiting this for two reasons. One is the obvious discussions around chairs and such: but the second reason? I think this is going to be a game changer on my lathe. I need to do various boring operations at my lathe, and to say that the extenders are “not ideal” would be an understatement.
Another boring post.
Whiffed again! Putting on my Vesper bevel hat going forward for these…