If you've ever tried to drill a dowel hole into the edge of a board at the drill press, you'll know the problem. The workpiece wants to tip, twist, or wander the moment the bit makes contact. You end up holding it with one hand, hoping for the best — and the result is rarely where you wanted it.
The HDS Drill Table Top was designed to solve the horizontal workholding problem: lock your workpiece flat, drill with confidence, no spinning, no slipping. But what about vertical drilling? That's where the HDS Vertical Fence Board (HDSDT006, £24.99) comes in.
The Problem with Vertical Drilling
Standard drill press tables aren't built for vertical workholding. They're flat surfaces designed for material lying horizontally. The moment you need to drill into an edge — for dowel joinery, mortises, pocket hole alignment, or end grain work — you're fighting the setup rather than focusing on the cut.
Improvised solutions (a vice bolted to the side, a scrap block clamped at an angle) work after a fashion, but they're slow to set up, inconsistent, and rarely repeatable. If you're drilling the same joint on ten pieces of timber, you need the same result every time.
The Solution: A Vertical Face That's Part of the System
The HDS Vertical Fence Board bolts directly to the rear of your HDS Drill Table Top using two included bolts. That's it. No drilling, no modification, no complex setup — it's attached and ready in under a minute.
Once in place, it gives you a solid, CNC-machined vertical face to clamp your workpiece against. Use your existing HDS Low Profile Track Clamps or standard HDS track clamps to lock the material to the vertical plane, then drill with the same confidence you'd have on a horizontal cut.
The result: precise, repeatable vertical drilling — dowel holes that line up, edges that meet cleanly, joints that actually fit.
What You Can Do With It
- Dowel joinery — drill into board edges for perfectly aligned dowel holes
- Mortise work — hold stock upright and drill a clean, consistent mortise
- End grain drilling — tackle end grain without the workpiece rocking
- Pocket hole alignment — keep material square and stable for pocket hole operations
- Any vertical drilling task where repeatability matters
What You Need
The Vertical Fence Board is an add-on for the HDS Drill Table Top (HDSDT001, £59.99) — you'll need the Drill Table Top as the base. If you don't have one yet, our bundle packs include clamps and zero clearance inserts at a saving over buying separately.
If you're already running an HDS Drill Table Top setup, the Vertical Fence Board slots straight in. One accessory, one minute, a whole new capability.