Thread: Drilling Pen Blanks

Yes, better the devil you know thannthe devil you don't.

Very interesting feedback on the drilling, quality drills do make a difference. Amos

Two things stirred from your story of such epic failure. Seems like forever ago I bought a bench top drill stand. I selected it for two reasons one it drills around 3 plus inches. Two on purchase I stripped the quill bearings replaced them before use knowing a lot of cheap Taiwanese machines had a reputation for rough bearings and horrible production waste inside lathes where I have seen one mates brand new lathe had been butchered inside using a hand operated grinder to give clearances leaving all the ground metal underneath the ways.. Also at this time I turfed the drive motor prompted by advice from the original owner of my big mill drill who had a bad experience with the original motor on the mill. I fitted a 1hp motor that eats hard work easily. Then searching the market for IMHO the best for me drill 7mm I only ever use this drill for many sizes the 7mm drill is manufactured by DeWalt. These drills give me up to hundreds of drillings and per pen costs are negligible, the only bad incident I cooked one at a Working With Wood Show Demo here in Canberra the VL100 lathe from Richard Raffan had an unknown to me reversing facility and the demo previously guy showed how to sand in reverse. It took me a short while to realise talking, demoing it made the drill red hot. My bad only failure my fault with these drills. Over all these years I have sent free to so many people one or more of these drills all over the world because so many were skeptics (those days are over on my pension). I then spent a day leveling every which way the parrallelism of the whole unit packing up here reducing there with accurate steel right angle square. Then I bought an XY axis cheap vice and stripped that cleaned adjusted all the slop out of it on the ways as well as. I have drilled leaving the drill switched on up to two hundred at a time blanks and my blanks are mostly rough shaped to chase the grain and nearly always right angle cut across the grain,
regard me as a pioneer doing this on this forum, not for the fainthearted drilling and turning the toughest of Aussie Burls etc.

The other very important choice of my drill stand was to be able to use a threaded rod through the quill from inside to lock the drill chuck, why because the original drill chuck flew off a few times so at another WWShow in Sydney I challenged the importer with my shonky drill chuck, he told me he was aware of this problem gave me for cheap a bigger and better chuck with this explanation. We in Australia are small potatoes as purchasers and he asked the Taiwon manufacturer of my drill could he buy their drills without the crook chuck and stems answer give same price with or without. Say no more. Now I have never altered the speed on my bench drill it runs rewal fast, rarely had a break on exit never use a board under the blanks.

Now the 7mm drill DeWalt DT5050 EXtreme2 HSS-G 7mm DIN338 is what is called a drillpoint has a short true drill point and flattish lands was originally designed by DeWalt Factory in America for use with Stainless Steel.

All of the above my way to overcome problems I have purchased for myself in the past many hundreds of these drills the majority for other people at my cost the only known failure was when I reverse drilled accidentally.All of these things I have repeated seems like so many times and for the last time here, my apologies to wholesalers, retailers users of equipment but all of this enables me to do what I have done and will do when the effort and costs are amotised for everything over all these years I am so far in front and share these experiences in the hope that we in sharing may save others bad experiences in other words it works for me.

Kind regards Peter.

Put simply, the 7mm drill DeWalt DT5050 EXtreme2 HSS-G 7mm DIN338, is a good drill bit I can testify to that, I took up Peter's advice about 5 years ago--it was good advice. Amos