Real problems, real solutions, no fluff. I have spent years working across multiple shops running gun drilling, BTA drilling, and ejector drilling machines — setting up jobs, troubleshooting coolant pressure and chip evacuation issues, drilling deep holes in everything from hydraulic cylinders to aerospace titanium. This site is where I share what I have learned.
The Customer Who Refused to Let Me Inspect the Part I’ve been running CNC lathes for about fourteen years now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that gut feelings on the shop floor are usually trying to tell you something. This story starts with one of those feelings, and it almost ended with a fifteen-thousand-dollar chargeback. The job came in through our regular quoting process. Nothing special about it on paper. But from the moment the material showed up, something did not sit right with me. I have learned to pay attention to that feeling. ...
The Regrind Disaster That Cost Us a Weekend and a Customer We had been sending our carbide drills to Great Lakes Tool Regrind for almost six years. They were one of those shops that just worked — decent pricing, reasonable turnaround, never gave us trouble. A few hundred dollars a month, routine stuff, nobody thought twice about it. That is probably why when it went bad, it went so bad so quietly. ...
I have spent years running deep hole drilling operations across a wide range of materials, and aluminum consistently surprises newcomers. Steel is forgiving in predictable ways — you manage heat, you manage feed, and the chips mostly cooperate. Aluminum fights you on a different front. The chips are long and stringy, the material wants to weld itself to your tool, and a perfectly sized bore can turn into a scratched mess in seconds. This article covers the three problems I run into most often with aluminum and exactly how I fix each one. ...
I have drilled more titanium deep holes than I care to count, and I learned the hard way that titanium is not “tough steel.” It is a different animal. The thermal conductivity is roughly one-fifth that of steel. The chips are not chips – they are razor-edged bands that carry all the heat out of the cut. The work-hardening rate is aggressive enough to ruin a new gun-drill in seconds if you let the tool rub instead of cut. Every fix I learned on steel had to be re-learned for titanium. This article covers the specific failure modes I encounter in titanium deep hole drilling and the adjustments that actually work. ...
Why Intermittent Problems Are Different I have spent more hours than I care to count standing at a machine, waiting for an intermittent problem to reappear. The part that makes these issues so frustrating is obvious: if the fault fired every cycle, I could isolate it in an afternoon. But when a tool burns up on one part, runs fine for the next ten, and then burns up again on part twelve, you are no longer troubleshooting a single event. You are chasing a condition that crosses some invisible threshold only part of the time. ...
I have inspected more used deep hole drilling machines than I care to count. Some were steals that ran for another decade. Others were money pits that cost more in repairs than the purchase price. The difference was the inspection — or the lack of one. This checklist is what I use every time, and it has saved me far more than it has cost. If you are not familiar with what makes a deep hole drilling machine different from standard machine tools, start with my overview on what to look for in a deep hole drilling machine. Then come back here for the pre-purchase deep dive. ...