I have one; I have used it occasionally on brass / aluminium, on mild steel I've had to push harder to get it to drill effectively but that is down to the lesser effect of the bearing & knurled wheel not having the leverage of a rack & pinion handle if you get my drift, but it does work. If you think about it there could be a way to cobble up some sort of lever action but I would be leary of using it on mild steel, stick to brass / aluminium it works ok.

George.

p.s S.O.D. posted as I was typing… I have also used mine to tap small holes in brass & CI … 2mm <.

Edited By mechman48 on 02/12/2019 16:45:38

Hi, I use mine all the time in brass to drill small oil can spout tips.

Cheers, Martin

If you want precision Albrecht do one but they are very spendy.

Steve

It can be handy when drilling small holes in the lathe as it makes it easy to peck drill But I don't find there is much more in the way of sencitivity and as my 13mm ARC drill chuck will hold down to less than 0.5mm I tend to use that.The usual 10mm drill chuck in the mill goes down to 0.3 so don't bother on that.

You still have to be careful not to apply too much pressure to the knurled ring as it is easy to bow a fine drill bit like this 0.35mm one. I tend to start with the bit less than 1mm away from the work so any slop that may be there (not noticed much) will be minimised with the full engagement of the slide.

I'll second 'IanT's' comment concerning the spindle to sleeve having too much 'slop'. I bought one of these items along with a small chuck to suit as I needed one to progress a job I had to get finished. The job was to make an 'in cylinder pressure sensor adaptor sleeve' which mounted internally a Kistler 1604a pressure sensor into a 8.5 mm sleeve which passed through a water jacket in a cylinder head. The sensor screwed into a 5mm thread internally at the base of the 100+mm long sleeve and connected to the combustion chamber via 3 ports drilled at an angle into the end of the sleeve. I had an order for 16 of these adaptor sleeves and they were needed 'yesterday'!

The sensitive drill unit needed a 15 micron plastic 'wrap' around the spindle to stop excessive slop. I was drilling three holes – 0.8mm, 1.0mm and 1.15mm after spoting the angle face with a 3mm end mill and then centre drilling to get an 'toe hold', the material was 318 stainless. I set it up in the mill and running with the high speed head at 8,000 rpm managed to drill them OK with the loss of only 1 drill (yes – you guessed it the 0.8mm one!). Apart from the 'slop', which the plastic 'wrap' cured (more or less!), my only other concern was with the bearing which after drilling all 48 holes got rather hot and a bit clanky. I actually made 51 holes as I had to produce a 'qualifying' sleeve for sign off of the order – purchase could not believe that a man in a shed could do what Kistler said would take them 12 weeks to do and that I could do it for half their price!

Some of the 'process' photos required by the customer:-

As I said in my post above RMA – they do a job for a price but you need to be the judge of how good your other equipment is – high speed is the answer to drilling small holes, especially so when using carbide drills (I used 3mm shank drills with reduced sizes of 0.8, 1.0 and 1.15mm – I believe they are PCB drills). I was using my mill with its high speed head, the quill drive on the HSH is sensitive, but not sensitive enough for when you 'break through', that seemed to be the point where the drill would break and sure enough one broke, even with the Arc sensitive attachment. Be prepared to do some fettling on the shaft as the 'slop' on mine was excessive, and to be honest the drill chuck supplied by arc was not what I would deem a quality item. But all in all you only get what you pay for these days. Am Albrecht attachment is the way to go but as mentioned above they are costly and difficult to find. I have now bought one (an Albrecht) for future jobs like the one described here.

The job described above was in 318 stainless so all in all it will probably work for you on bronze.

Thanks for the pointers Jason, it's a job I'm not really looking forward to. I have a Centec 2A with the quill head and everything on that seems healthy. Might practice on some scrap when I get a chance. Of course Murphy's law will then operate…..