Drilling blanks

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kenlholley

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Joined
Apr 15, 2013
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89
Location
Cape Coral, FL 33914
I am very new to pen turning, i still am in the early learning stages. I am having problems drilling out blanks, especially 10mm for cigar pens, without wallowing out the hole. This causes the tube to fit very loosely in the blank and sometimes slip out during turning. I use a dedicated pen blank chuck and a drill chuck on my lathe to drill. I start each hole with a centering bit then switch to my regular bit. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
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The nearest to accurate fairly priced drill I use is called in America DeWalt Extreme 2 it is a drill point drill with flattish lands initially made to drill aluminium, they are sharp and I have never had breakout or false tracking, do no use a board under the blank, never vary the fairly high speed of the drill HOWEVER I spent hours aligning the drill press every which way to ensure vertical etc.

This drill in many sizes is made in America and because we went METRIC a real long time ago I use metric sizes.

Something else I did when I bought my Taiwanese drill stand was replaced the crap bearings, now hundreds of thousands of holes later nearly 30 yrs of use still going strong, I have making Slimlines drilled up to 500 blanks with A drill for 7mm it is DT5050 HSS-G DIN 338 its freezing in my shop outside but they make 10mm so I wont go out just now.

Have success.

Kind regards Peter.
 
Ken,

Forgive me not fully awake I just reread your post and you are using your lathe to drill blanks.Now like Mrs Beaton says first slauter your ox now insert a dead centre in your lathe head stock and tail stock bring the two points nearly together lock the tailstock and place a thinnish feeler guage strip and gently bring the points together with the flat of the feeler between, now if you get a deflection of the feeler it will show for certain which way the alignment of your lathe has to proceed.

Now I assume you will have spotless cleaned both morse tapers prior to inserting the dead centres.

Of course these are basic essentials to know and learn if you wish to use the lathe to drill blanks not always the best way to go in the long run unless you are prepared to test and prove otherwise I assure you it can be of lasting benefit to align your lathe anyway.

Kind regards Peter.
 
Besides the potential for the lathe being the issue, be sure the bit is straight and sharp. Then make sure the blank and the bit are chucked properly.
 
One of the easy things to miss is debris in the morse taper. One piece of shavings in either the head stock or tail stock tapers can cause the tooling not to be centered.

(drilling with the chuck can leave shavings in the morse taper on the headstock - not a problem with the chuck, but it does affect the MT drive center later in the day)
 
Thank you all for the tips. I will definitely try them all. In the short time I have been turning pens I've really come to enjoy it. A lot of satisfaction when a pen goes together right.
 
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