A drill drift is a flat, tapered hand tool used to safely remove taper-shank drills, chucks, and sleeves from a Morse Taper spindle or socket by driving the drift through the spindle's slot to break the taper's grip. Buyohlic supplies drill drifts for machinists across the USA who work with Morse Taper tooling on drill presses, lathes, and milling machines, and need a reliable way to release taper-fitted tooling without damaging the spindle or the tool.
How a Drill Drift Works
Morse Taper fittings hold tooling in place through friction alone, a self-locking taper angle that grips tightly once seated, with no threads or mechanical fasteners involved. While this makes for a very secure, accurate fit during use, it also means the tooling cannot simply be pulled out by hand once seated. A slot machined through the side of the spindle or socket allows a flat drift to be inserted and driven, typically with a soft-faced hammer, against the back of the taper-shank tool, breaking the friction grip and pushing the tool free.
Using the correct size and thickness of drift matters significantly here, since an undersized or worn drift can slip within the slot, deform under the impact of driving, or fail to transfer force effectively to the tool being removed.
Common Applications
- Removing taper-shank drill bits from drill press spindles
- Releasing Morse Taper chucks and sleeves from the lathe tailstocks
- Freeing taper-fitted tooling from milling machine spindles
- General maintenance and tooling changeovers on Morse Taper equipment
Choosing the Right Drill Drift
Match the drift size to the specific Morse Taper number, MT1 through MT6, being common sizes, of the spindle or socket slot you are working with, since drifts are not universal across taper sizes. A drift set covering multiple common MT sizes is a practical choice for shops running mixed equipment with different taper sizes across various machines. Always strike a drift with a soft-faced hammer rather than a hardened steel hammer to avoid deforming the drift's working edge or chipping the spindle over repeated use.
Keeping a drift on hand for every Morse Taper size represented in a shop avoids the frustration of improvising a removal method mid-job, and it protects both the tooling and the machine spindle over years of regular taper changeovers.
