Cutting Sheet metal

[NightWinder]

What kind of Drill Bit would you guys recommend when drilling through sheet metal? The best!!!

[David King]

If you want round holes you can try to find a 3 flute drill bit:
http://www.brownells.com/aspx/NS/sto...il.aspx?p=6543

Regular drill bits will always drill triangular holes unless you drill smaller and ream to the correct size.

Consider using a hole punch.

Enco always has some cobalt, split point drills on sale, those work about as well as any. If you are planning on drilling lots of holes you can save a bundle by buying 12 piece packs.
http://www.use-enco.com/CGI/INLMPI?P...GE=9&PMCTLG=01

[David Schwab]

Those step drill bits are also good.

[SkinnyWire]

Those step drill bits are also good.

More or less "self de-burring too". Might be worth a shot.

[NightWinder]

If you want round holes you can try to find a 3 flute drill bit:
http://www.brownells.com/aspx/NS/sto...il.aspx?p=6543

Regular drill bits will always drill triangular holes unless you drill smaller and ream to the correct size.

Consider using a hole punch.

Enco always has some cobalt, split point drills on sale, those work about as well as any. If you are planning on drilling lots of holes you can save a bundle by buying 12 piece packs.
http://www.use-enco.com/CGI/INLMPI?P...GE=9&PMCTLG=01

I was considering a punch like the tabletop C punches. I think it may be a bit harder to line up in accuracy?

[Joe Gwinn]

What kind of Drill Bit would you guys recommend when drilling through sheet metal? The best!!!

Not quite enough information. How many holes will be made? How good a hole do you need? The questions are how accurate (hole placement, diameter, roundness), how smooth the walls must be, how much of a burr is acceptable, and what materials (copper, aluminum, brass, german silver, mild steel, stainless steel) will be machined?

[NightWinder]

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Not quite enough information. How many holes will be made? How good a hole do you need? The questions are how accurate (hole placement, diameter, roundness), how smooth the walls must be, how much of a burr is acceptable, and what materials (copper, aluminum, brass, german silver, mild steel, stainless steel) will be machined?

German Silver. Accuracy is a must, and cleanliness also. Basically to do the odd job covers with extra holes, etc. I have been using a x-y and a laser but this has been for forbon and Mylar ??

[David King]

If you want accuracy then either make a thick steel drilling template for each permutation on a milling machine or do very careful layout with awl and then center punch. I'm very fond of my Starrett automatic center punch. Make sure you drill into a hardwood block to support the work. Drilling from the inside>out makes the most sense but use a sharp drill regardless to minimize deformation.

I haven't drilled german silver but you may need to use a low lead angle drill to keep it from catching and threading onto the drill as you pop through (very likely to mangle your cover when this happens). Slow spiral drills intended for cast iron will work but you can also add a small 90 degree bevel ("lead angle") to the cutting edge of any drill and get the same effect. I use a diamond hone to do this and make every effort to maintain identical geometry on each flute to avoid oversized holes.

[chevalij]

Wouldn't drilling from the outside in make more sense? The burrs etc would end up inside and easier to clean.

[RedHouse]

Punching works good for me, still haven't made the indexing attachment though:

http://users.isp.com/brad_anne/PunchingHoles.htm

[NightWinder]

>>

Punching works good for me, still haven't made the indexing attachment though:

http://users.isp.com/brad_anne/PunchingHoles.htm

Oh, Thats money! thats what I was looking for...Got some more??

[spud1950]

RedHouse - Where do you get those great looking Strat pickup covers from?

[David King]

Nightwinder, if you have a buddy with a decent sized metal lathe and a 4 jaw chuck or just a serious drill press to drill that hole in the ram -you'd be all set. I have a Dake 1 ton arbor press that I use to install frets and it's very useful to have the hole to hold my tooling. Hole punch die sets in various sizes can be picked up cheap on ebay and taken to be sharpened as necessary. Harbor Freight sells several sizes of arbor press for dirt cheap usually. An indexing system would be very easy to formulate using a stack of identical spacers for each hole spacing. Just pull out a spacer after punching each hole to move the cover over one precise segment.

[RedHouse]

Oh, Thats money! thats what I was looking for...Got some more??

I totally agree, ...here's two more pic's:

RedHouse - Where do you get those great looking Strat pickup covers from?

Hmm, geez that was like 6 or 7 years ago, I don't recall. I do remember they had to be special ordered and I waited like 30 days to get them in.

But don't get too excited, they were not a slam-dunk and they were chrome plated brass (which isn't popular around here).

They came to me with a domed shaped top, meant to cover the poles and all of a Strat single coil pickup. I really think they were meant to be a lipstick tube look-alike but in testing they sounded dull when covering the whole pickup, we thought they were'nt going to do untill after punching the holes we got the Strat sound/vibe back and no great treble loss to complain about.
(my Strat winds are bright anyway so they can stand cover)

I needed to make them look like standard Strat covers so I had to work them a little, flatten the tops and punch holes. Amazingly I didn't have to re-chrome because I used mylar sheet on the press surfaces and didn't scratch or scuff the surfaces at all.

Then the next hurdle I found that even after flattening they were like 1/16" too tall, not interferance but the poles looked sunk down into the covers and they needed to look standard Strat style for the client. The bobbin needed to be raised 1/16".

So I made my bobbin sets use two "top" pieces of flatwork (1/16") one on top in the usual place, the other super-glued to the top of the bottom flatwork, this effectively raised the coil area of the bobbin enough to get them all the way up into the top of the cover while the cover flanges remained on the base flatwork.

Certainly not a slam-dunk, but got there in the end, and IMHO they were beautiful. I still have one more set I'm saving for myself to put into a special guitar ...someday. Most of (90%) of my work is custom one-off stuff, I've pondered thoughts of going into a ltd production thing and maybe I will now that I've got more time.

The whole thing came up when a guy saw my old beater Strat and just had to have some. These two single coils here are not the covers pictured above:



these are off of some old DiMarzio pickups made way back in the early 80's, a coil-tapped job with P-90 style magnets, they don't make them anymore and when I called DiMarzio, of course they said they did't have any of these covers anymore. Much to my surprise a guy called me back in a couple-o-weeks and said that he looked all around in the production facility and offices on the odd chance that some covers might be laying around but no luck. I was impressed with the follow-up call in light of how much everyone grumble's about DiMarzio these days.

...Harbor Freight sells several sizes of arbor press for dirt cheap usually. An indexing system would be very easy to formulate using a stack of identical spacers for each hole spacing. Just pull out a spacer after punching each hole to move the cover over one precise segment...

Yes that is nearly what I've got going, I use the Harbor freight press but I went with the "duplicating" indexer concept, so I can place a known-good cover to the left of the un-punched one, then it becomes the index marker locating the holes for the new one. This way I can do any pickup cover without re-making spacers all the time.
(sorry, no pic's)

...Wouldn't drilling from the outside in make more sense? ...

Funny, I have a friend that just retired from Boeing (airplane company near by) and he too suggested this, what's funny is he said that even after I showed him what I had done. IMHO the punching is the way to go, once you get it set up, it takes only a few minutes to get much higher quality results than drilling.

[kevinT]

This is a very interesting thread....thanks for sharing your info Redhouse...it is very enlightening.

BTW, how is your ingenious little traverse mechanism working out on your winder?.....that is so cool..