Hi. I just bought a large hand drill off craigslist. It is 10 amps, with a 3/4" chuck, and the data on it says that it can drill a 3/4" hole in steel. I also bought a whole tray of fat S&D drill bits. I just tried the drill out, and it really required some hard pushing. I tried to make a rivet bolster out of a junk end of a steering rod. Not mild steel, but not really hard either. Spark tested intermediate, and could be cut easily with a Starrett bi-metal hacksaw blade. I needed to sit on the drill to make the 1/4" hole. There was no way any chips were going to come out for a 3/8" hole. So, I rigged up a "blacksmith's drill" according to the Blueprints and went to work. That big drill just flew through the steel, kicking out a bunch of cutting oil smoke and brown chips.
By the way, the rivet bolster performed well at the forge, but it requires careful measurement of the rivet before setting, else the heads will come out asymmetric.
So, I looked around for a feed pressure chart, and surprisingly, it was pretty hard. One thing that I noticed was that magnetic drill spec's listing 3/4" hole capacity have about 1000 pounds of feed pressure rating. Then, I found this:
http://www.aaaproducts.com/downloads...2/J2pg6_27.pdf
Wow. So what do I do with those 1" plus S&D bits? Drill magnesium?
