ZELCAN Magnetic Drill Press, 1100W, 40mm Boring

The ZELCAN Magnetic Drill Press is a corded, portable mag drill: rather than sitting on a bench, it switches on an electromagnet and clamps itself to the steel you are drilling. At £209.49 it takes #9 in this guide, with a 4.4 average from 35 ratings, and the listing ranks it 10th in Benchtop Drill Presses - a category name that sits oddly on a tool sold on its portability.

Its own paperwork is a tidy example of the point this guide keeps making. The spec table gives the motor 1100W in one row and "1100 Amps" in another; on 230V mains a 1100W motor draws around 4.8A. The bullets are more consistent - 1 1/2 HP, 1100W, 550 RPM - but they also promise it bores "up to 50mm deep and 40mm across", which makes the 50mm a drilling depth, not a hole diameter, even though both numbers share one sentence. The chuck size is given as 1.6 inches, which is about 40.6mm: within a hair of the 40.64mm metal capacity in the same table and the 40mm boring figure in the bullets. Read across the rows and this is a 40mm-bore machine with a fixed 550 RPM, not a 50mm one. The star bars (6, 7, 18 and 69) add up to 100, yet the listing counts 35 ratings; treated as shares they average 4.44, which matches the 4.4 shown, so those bars are proportions rather than the 35 votes themselves. Everything on this page comes from the Amazon listing as published - its spec fields, bullets and customer ratings. We have not tested the ZELCAN ourselves.