Drilling

The term drilling covers all methods of producing cylindrical holes in a workpiece using chip-removing cutting tools. In addition to short-hole drilling and deep-hole boring, this concept also includes various consecutive machining operations, such as broaching, reaming, reboring and certain forms of finishing such as sizing and roller burnishing. What all these processes have in common is the combination of rotary and linear feed motion. However, this article only deals with short-hole drilling.

In the past, short holes were mainly drilled on conventional vertical machines, often resulting in production bottlenecks. Now, this operation can be performed on most machines, making it possible to quickly drill short holes on modern flexible cells, machining centers and CNC lathes.

The fact that drilling is by far the most common machining operation, and that the majority of drilled holes are between 10 and 20 mm in diameter, clearly demonstrates the importance of short holes in the modern machining sector. The development of tools for drilling short holes has radically altered both preliminary and subsequent machining requirements.

Modern tools mean that solid drilling can now be carried out in a single operation, without a center point, and with a quality that, in most cases, eliminates the need for additional operations to improve dimensional accuracy and surface finish.