Drilling itty bitty holes

They are called "Sensitive" drill chucks.

McMaster has them, what you need is a sensitive drill chuck, or a CNC milling machine that would apply consistent feed.

========== see

-- Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

Just go to Farnell / element 14 or RS components and grab a PCB drill the right size. Get ones with the 1/8 shank. I've use them routinely in my big old Waldown radial utility drill press and they work fine. The carbide ones are a bit fragile but ok if treated nicely.

Buy a Foredom flexshaft and drill press attachment, it's a lifetime investment and really useful for handwork and finishing. I drill thousands of holes with similar sized drills in 14 ga. sterling. I find a slow speed and beeswax as a lubricant works best. When the drills break it is usually because they are either dull or because the work moves.

Harbor Freight has an little air tool Item # 47869 that has the high rpm's for drilling small holes. Somewhere on the internet there is a web site showing how some kids made a drilling machine for PBC's that used one of these to drill. The machine drilled from the bottom up. A laser pointer mounted above showed where the hole would be.

Dan

= Alternate suggestions for methods of drilling itty bitty holes

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when I was working with the guys at GE in Daytona, they drilled fiberglas PCB material at >120Krpm. Of course, they were drilling a 1/2" stack at 10 "hits" per second.... (all .015 to .032 holes at that speed; carbide, only)

LLoyd

The Harbor Freight tool only turns up to 56,000 rpm.

Dan

Dremel Rotary Tool Work Station. ;-)

It may be a friend with an itty bitty drill press, as used for drilling circuit boards. Some big drill presses, particularly Asian imports, are so sloppy a sensitive chuck won't help keep from breaking drills.

Example:

I use a an overrun small 12v DC motor fitted with a pin chuck and mounted in a housing which has an extension that slides freely in the tailstock chuck.

This gives me a high speed (15,000 RPM) tailstock drill. Since I manually feed the motor housing I can directly feel both drill torque and feed pressure.

A JPG is in the drop box under the heading "Tailstock Drill chuck"

Jim

Patience? ;) I bought a set of handheld pin vises for my number drill set. I wonder how well those would chuck...

Do you think Amiron will get that for it? The first 240 viewers didn't think it was worth that...241 with me. You might for your dual unit, though, if you still have 'em.

I imagine that most folks' minds would wander toward little hobby drills rather than big industrial units. Small bit = small drill.

Frinstance:

-- Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble. -- Carl Jung

Also -- the price when I got mine (near 1974 or so) was closer to $150.00. :-) The current price on the auction looks about $200.00 less than Cameron's own new price for the tool. It also came with a

I've been very pleased with it over the years. I've even used it (with the dial indicator) and a small index head to make miniature barrel-keys for a multiple disk drive tray which needed each drive carrier locked in to power on each drive. Supposedly an early implementation of hot swap.

Enjoy, DoN.

(...)

I don't see anything between:

--Winston

Nothing! The JPG and accompaning text file were posted to the drop box but have't appeared yet. Not sure of the reason for the delay so I've posted duplicate files to

Nifty!

--Winston