@Malkevin, still an awesome creation after all these years though. even if i couldnt make it work it helped me create my miner. thank you so much.

@sparkleyCan The command assignments got broken long ago.

Christ, has it been 3 years already???
I keep meaning to come back and redo this.

now this is maybe a problem just for me but i cant find any commands on the hotbar, should it be like that?

great job

Whats the speed of your pistons?

You want no more than 0.3m/s, otherwise the shaft will bend

I loved this thing so much that I'm attempting to build my own using a captured Mining Carrage, But I can't make it work right. The clamps keep coming loose, and the pistons get incredibly unstable while drilling.

FYI: Last Thursday's patch changed the bounding boxes on small thrusters, so for now the stabilizers don't work correctly without blowing each other off.

So, uhhh, don't use them.

lol.... shafthead...

This looks like a true industrial masterpiece, i`ll check it out :)

I like how you added thrusters and gyros to stabilize the drill head. I tried a similar rig to this and it only worked well with gyros and thrusters too.

Really cool rig! I made something similar but with a 2 part system so it has no maximum drill depth. Nothing like the refining and other features that yours has though. It also only drilled out a 12.5 X 12.5 m hole. Great work. I would love to get your oppinion on mine. I don't want to advertise on your page though so I won't post a link here.

How did you get the pointed drill head to work? I tried it on mine but for some reason the push back force seemed to be much stronger and my stabilizer clamps on the rock face kept coming loose. Didn't happen with the flat head though. My only idea was that somehow the drill radii of each individual drill overlapped and made the flat head drill faster so it gave less push back. Did you have a problem with that?

i waws working on this as well but i coulndt stop it from shaking apart the deeper i made it go so i swapped to a difrent design was waiting till they fixed the pistons lol YOU ARE A MASTER! lol

[part 2] (because of comment limits)
How about adding a extendable guide rail's to the head?
Non-locked landing gears and tires were often used for guid pre-piston/pre-big drill mining station builds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjZadnWTmog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Kfm01MaMU
It should be useable for Piston based drills too. The further ahead along the strecthec piston chain it is applied, the better (ideally so far ahead that it cannot be used before the head is at last a bit out outside).

Some ideas regarding the drilling:
When drilling into certain materials it helps to pre-drill a hole use a small, stable drill. You could then just follow the pre-drilled hole using a pole produding from the head.
Or maybe some tires?

It also might help to weight down the drillhead with extra weight. Especially heavy armor blocks.
The head as it is now is a very small, leightweight physical grid (a large ship that get's energy from another grid). So it will be much more vulnerable to the forces of the drills then a big ship with directly attached drills. The more weight you put on it, the more stable it will become. As you make it bigger, you could even place refineries and other heavy gear on the drill.
[part 1]

@Doobry - slow and steady wins the race, if your pistons extend too fast the drill starts digging at an angle, I should also say this wasn't possible before Thursday patch - which fixed a lot of the problems with pistons.

The other main problem was making a drill design that didn't skitter across the surface wildly, I took an inspiration from a wood drill bit and used a protruding drill to act as an anchor point to guide the rest of the drill.
Worked pretty good although it does still twist slightly, might try a drill head with multiple protrusions at some point.

Damn you created something like this before me? I was thinking of making one a little different then yours even before I saw this one.

This, my friend, is the best drilling rig I've seen so far on SE! Congrats! :)) love how it doesn't fall to bits when you extend the pistons like all my efforts do.. Beautiful! :-)