Drilling Stainless Steel
Sail|May 2017

How to make holes in a not-so-hard metal

Chip Lawson
Drilling Stainless Steel

For many years I hated drilling stainless steel. It’s hard, it requires expensive cobalt or carbide bits and it takes a long time to drill. In other words, I had many good reasons for feeling this way. However, as it turns out, all of them were based on incorrect information.

First and foremost was the belief that stainless is a “hard” material. Because I thought stainless was hard, I would run my drill at high speed, thinking it would otherwise take forever to complete a single hole. I could not have been more wrong. Thanks to the advice of an exceptional metal worker, I learned the right way to drill stainless with standard High Speed Steel (HSS) drill bits.

Stainless is actually a relatively soft metal, at least in its initial state. What stainless tends to do is “work harden” fairly quickly when heated, and drilling at high speed creates a lot of heat. When stainless steel work hardens, it becomes very hard and extremely difficult to drill.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 2017 من Sail.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 2017 من Sail.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.