drilling straight holes

[Mr_Mike]

JGrout said:

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this


plus this

and a fabricated drill guide out of steel with a plate and a tube to guide the drill bit at least 5" long.

clamp the plate to the work insert the drill into the tube drill the hole.

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Agreed. A purpose build drill guide is money well spent.

Learn to sharpen the bit too or you will buying a hundred bits or so. Glue-lam is hard.

I'd build a guide to do all holes at once. You don't want to pattern to vary. I might even add waste holes to the sides of the guides so you can attach a vacuum. Keeps the bit cooler and uses less power if you remove the chips instead of them jamming the hole.

[rwe2156]

Long auger bit/super heavy duty drill.

If it needs to be exact, fabricate a drill guide and off you go (or somebody with a strong back).

Any way you do this, its a lot of work,

[JR1]

I agree with Routerman get a drill pres that is up to the job! Yes the other ways can be made to work but the cost of the tools and the labor plus the waste will easily pay for a better press and indexing table.

[Cooler]

General's Drill guide will get you straight holes. I don't know if it will get you the depth you want, but if it does not you can finish with an auger bit.

http://www.amazon.com/General-Tools-Inst...uide+attachment

It appears that the Wolfcraft will get a little over 5" in depth:

http://www.amazon.com/Wolfcraft-4525404-...2AZJAMXSJ4XDWV2

[Steve N]

You say nothing beside "glu-lams" and needing holes to be 5" deep. I'm seeing trusses in my minds eye??????

If they are trusses, all I can say is what I would do. First my work is separated into two basic types.

1) Bring the work to the tool, which is small to medium sized work that can easily go to a machine. So not trusses.

2) Bring the tool to the work, this is large stuff, like trusses.

So if you are talking about 100 holes to be drilled with precision into trusses I would go to the tool rental dood, and ask for a Core drill, on a stand




It will chuck whatever kind of bit you want. You can move the drill to where you need the holes, and depth wise you could go 12" without sweating if you have the correct bits. If super great accuracy is required most of them have mounting feet as this one shows. Front man goes around with a template of the footprint, and drills out 4 holes with the template, drill team comes behind and sets the core drill into the holes, and goes to work. Easy peasy 100 holes, ehhhh, maybe 2 hours. Done as accurately as you want them to be

[mike4244]

Install a 1/4" airplane bit in the drill press. These are long machine drills,from 6" to at least 18". 8" would be fine. Drill as deep as the quill allows.Loosen the chuck and raise it leaving the bit in the beam.Tighten the chuck and finish drilling.Now you have a thru pilot hole.Bore the 1" hole from each side.I have done this before.I used a spade bit that I ground especially for this use.I cut the point down so it was 1/4" at the top.I filed the sides of the point til it was 1/4".This left me with a pilot on the spade bit.The work was centered on the piloted tip and clamped.I then bored from each end.You can do the same without modifying the bit. One extra step is all, instead of the piloted bit,chuck a slightly pointed 1/4" round or even a machine bit for alignment.Then after centering the beam ,bore your hole from each end
mike

[Cliff Ober]

Steve N said:

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So if you are talking about 100 holes to be drilled with precision into trusses I would go to the tool rental dood, and ask for a Core drill, on a stand....

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Easy peasy 100 holes, ehhhh, maybe 2 hours. Done as accurately as you want them to be

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Uhhhh, the OP mentioned *500* holes...


Cliff

[Steve N]

Consider it a math problem Cliff, it is still going to make very accurate holes quickly. I don't know for certain if my guess is correct that these "glu-lams" are trusses, or large pieces. If they aren't, get a bigger capacity drill press, as already suggested.

[CapecodWW]

We ended up completing this job about a week ago and used a magnetic drill similar to (Milwaukee 4270-20 Compact Electromagnetic Drill Press) to drill the holes. we clamped the metal plate to the truss, and drilled the holes with the plat in place. the magnetic base held the drill to the plate and were pretty much self drilling.

[Dara]

Darn...too late.
I was going to suggest clamping the plates on and drilling halfway thru on each side.

Glad it worked out