What tooling to drill lots of 10mm holes 45mm deep?

[AlanMJackson]

Hi Mike,

I'm making some reconfigurable shelving. I'm drilling a line of holes along lengths of wood, about 40 holes per metre. As mentioned before the holes are 10mm through holes and 45mm deep. Because I'm drilling from both sides to get a good finish I'm actually drilling 80 holes per metre but if I could get a good finish on both sides drilling straight through I could save lots of time.

If I could get accuracy of 0.5mm for each hole that would be great. Even 1mm would probably be fine. So I don't need much accuracy.

With help and ideas from the forum I've tried some experiments today and found I can get feed rates of 400mm/sec but the surface finish is poor. So I've written some drilling gcode that feeds at 50mm/sec to break the surface for a few mm then goes to 400mm/sec for the rest of the drill cycle. Which means I've halved the program time and I'm now doing a metre in half an hour.

I've got a batch of 25m to do now and I'll be wanting to do 100 - 200m soon. I ran the hand drill for about 6 hours the other day and about 2 hours today. So it looks like I'll be running the machine for a few hours a day.

[Lee Roberts]

With help and ideas from the forum I've tried some experiments today and found I can get feed rates of 400mm/sec but the surface finish is poor. So I've written some drilling gcode that feeds at 50mm/sec to break the surface for a few mm then goes to 400mm/sec for the rest of the drill cycle. Which means I've halved the program time and I'm now doing a metre in half an hour.

Hi Alan,

That is good news i'm glad your getting somewhere with it, I'm now wondering if you could go all the way through with the holes but on the last few mm drop back down to 50mm/sec and hope for the same finish as the top?

.Me