A Delta Homecraft bench drill is hardly a "monster" unless you are looking at it from the perspective of a watchmaker. There is an old story about two young fellows who were serving apprenticeships- one as a machinist apprentice, one as a watchmaker apprentice. The machinist apprentice was showing the watchmaker apprentice around the machine shop. The watchmaker apprentice suddenly gave out with an exclamation, something to the effect of "Holy cow ! I didn't know there were taps THAT big !" As the story goes, the watchmaker apprentice was looking at a 1/4-20 tap laying on a workbench. To most of us, even those of us who do work on fine mechanisms and small precision work, a 1/4-20 tap is hardly a "big tap", nor is a Delta Homecraft drill any kind of heavyweight or monster. To many of us, a Bridgeport Milling Machine is considered as a lightweight or light duty mill. I own a Bridgeport in my home shop and can attest to it being a lighter duty mill and know its limitations. My light drill press is a Powermatic drill press, floor model, with 1/2" chuck. I took it apart myself when I bought it used and brought it home 35 years ago in a Ford Bronco. I carried the pieces into my basement and reassembled that drill by myself as well. I am guessing that the Powermatic drill is maybe 300 lbs at most, and that is on the heavier end for this type/class of drill press when compared with a Delta.
If I want to drill larger holes or have heavier work such as structural steel, blacksmithing projects, or similar, I use my Cincinnati Bickford "camelback" drill. This is a 1917 machine with the original 3 HP motor on it, number 3 Morse Taper socket in the spindle, having back gearing and flat leather belts. As camelback drills go, my Cincinnati Bickford is on the lighter end. It weighs somewhere around 1500 lbs. Good iron, and it does the jobs for me.
A good little US Made bench drill such as was made by Delta, Southbend, Buffalo Forge and a few other firms would weigh a good deal more than 100 lbs. "Traditional" US made machine tools always had good castings with plenty of iron and steel in them. This insured rigidity as well as some dampening of vibration and also insured accuracy. Take away that iron and the machine becomes light and springy.
I've been on a job where a crew took a Buffalo Forge bench drill to the work and clamped it in place to drill and ream some holes. It weighed LESS than a Milwaukee magnetic base portable drill which could handle a number 3 Morse Taper shank. They bolted that Buffalo Forge bench drill press's base to the work (a large gearcase on a hoist), turned the head of the drill so it was opposite the table and slid the head along the column to suit the work. THAT was a portable drill press in my book.
If you want a "portable drill" by definition, look at the magnetic based drills. These are meant to be carried to the work and use an electromagnet to hold the drill solidly on the work (like structural steel, boiler and tank work, shipbuilding, powerplant or railroad equipment, truck frames, heavy equipment work, etc). In the field, we often took the magnetic based drills and set them on a piece of steel plate or heavy steel channel and turned on the magnetic base. This gave us a drill press to drill non-ferrous or small work.
Possibly the lightest and simplest portable drill press of all is down in my shop. Some call it an "old man". It is a "Keystone" boiler ratchet with number 3 Morse Taper shank, and a "drilling post" to clamp to the work. No electricity needed. A good head to figure how best to set things up, then a little muscle and patience and you drill and ream holes, some as big as 1 1/2" through some heavy steel using only your muscles. You can carry a boiler ratchet and drilling post with one hand, and they are US made. Entirely portable, and you can stow them under a workbench, in a broom closet or under your bed.
100 lbs is, to me at least, hardly a weight to consider as being "monsterous". I was given a Chinese made Craftsman bench drill press (which I passed along to another friend). It was a poor copy of a traditional bench drill press, and I could pick it up with one hand. The castings were lightweight and rough looking, and the overall fit and finish of the parts was piss poor. As the man says: "You gets what you pay for".
I look at machinist bench vises (hardly worthy of the name) offered for sale these days. I look at the weights, and am always amazed at how little they weigh. A good traditional 4 1/2" or 5" machinist bench vise by a maker like Athol, Columbian, Reed, Prentice, Parker, Morgan, or similar would weigh somewhere around 100 lbs. Get a vise that looks vaguely similar, made in China, and the weight is barely 1/3 of that.
Try using those Chinese vises like you'd use a REAL machinist vise- cold bending steel flat bar using a 3 lb hammer, or driving out a stubborn pin or using a hammer and cape chisel to chip a groove or chip a piece of stock to rough it down to size.... and you had better be wearing steel cap shoes as it is likely the moveable jaw of that vise will land on your foot.
If you want a small drill, Larry Vanice has given you a couple of manufacturers. These are typically high speed sensitive drills. These typically are used for very small diameter drills. If you want a drill press to run bits up to 1/2" including drilling of steel, then your Delta Homecraft drill is kind of the low end of the spectrum. If you want portability, in bygone days, the power tool manufacturers used to sell "drill press stands" in which a hand-held electric drill could be mounted. Some of these stands would handle a 1/2" or even a 3/4" capacity drill motor. Even those stands were well made, using a piece of heavy-wall round steel tube that was often finish ground for the column, and iron castings for the base and for the holding fixture to mount the electric drill. If you hoped to push a drill of any size through steel, you needed mechanical advantage, and that required a rigid structure to prevent springing. Even those stands for portable hand held drills were made with that degree of rigidity and mechanical advantage.
Over time, we learn there are certain immutable and possibly unwritten laws that govern most of what we do or come into contact with. One of those laws is simply that if you want a machine tool to do a certain job or class or work, you have to have a good design along with the "beef" or iron. Another basic principal is "there are no bargains". IOW, if you buy some lightweight drill press from China, don't expect it to be particularly accurate, nor expect it to even have a decent chuck or properly machined and fitted parts. It will be a crude imitation of what the US made drills were. The low price may prove to be no bargain in the long run.
