On Fri, Jun 3, 2022 at 01:33 AM, OldToolmaker wrote:
The Cameron drill press I found online
has a price tag of over $1600.00. I can¡¯t imagine what might make it so expensive.
When you get into serious micro-drilling you can spend many thousands (?/$ - whatever). The last machine I saw (American made) did not have a spindle - drills were held in a sapphire vee block with the drive belt running over the shank to rotate them - all drills had to have an enlarged shank. I dimly recall it was by Najet. The belt was angled to push the drill into the work. My old boss made his own with a PTFE vee block, and the drill horizontal, to drill hundreds of 0.002" & 0.003" holes in dies used to extrude material for the earliest carbon fibres. He said it was slow but never snapped a drill.
With a Unimat consider mounting the job on the cross slide and using the carriage for the feed. It might be worth making a vertical slide if you have many of these jobs to do.
Note that micro drilling is considered (by some) to be using any drill under 0.1" and requires special care. Also drilling a depth more than 10 times the drill diameter is considered deep hole drilling, so when I was drilling 1.2 mm holes 30 mm deep I should have had all sorts of problems, but with the correct choice of drill it was OK. Also with the 0.9 mm holes 15 mm deep - all done on the SL with a bit of a special setup. I have yet to try a 0.05 mm (~ 0.002") drill - smallest I have - but the company who supplied it go down to 0.0002". However, their old catalogue says they do not offer a sharpening service below 0.0008". I'm not sure where I would start with something like that
