Material Used, Types and Commercial Aspects of Drill Bits

03/04/2020

The industrial revolution owes a lot to the commercialization of the mechanical sector. The production segment and the automobile field were and still are considered a part of the mechanical sector. Important elements of the mechanical sector include the lathe, welding machinery, cutting equipment, electro-mechanic devices and so on.

One core mechanical concept which still manages to hold ground is the drilling part, which is an essential part of many processes. Talking about the core of the drilling process, a drill bit is what dictates the terms. It is a cutting tool used for the creation of cylindrical type of holes. The drills hold the bits and these bits rotate to provide torque as well as axial force for creating holes.

As a matter of fact, there are some specific types of bits which are used for creating non-cylindrical types of holes. In terms of the parts of a drill bit, the cutting edges lie at one side and the shank on the other side. The shank is that part of the drill bit which gets grasped by the chuck (the specialized type of clamp ) of the drill.

Materials Used

Commonly used materials used for making it include steel and carbides. Here soft low carbon steel, high carbon steel, high speed steel and even cobalt steel alloys are used while tungsten carbides are a popular type of carbide used. The wear resistant polycrystalline diamond (PCD) is also used to make these. In terms of coatings, titanium nitride, black oxide, titanium aluminum nitride, diamond powder, zirconium nitrides are used. As they are available in many types of metals, these are often called as metal bits.

Types of Drill Bits

There are close to 20 types are available but in the commercial sense, only the following hold ground. These are:

Twist Bit
Spade Bit
Masonry Bit
Hole Saw Bit
Tile and Glass Bit
Forstner Bit

The Commercial Aspects of the Drill Bit Segment

In the engineering world, not only the drill bit but even the entire drilling machine is often dubbed as a drill. Apart from this, the word 'drill' is also synonymous with the procedure that is drilling or at times even the opening (hole). Now coming to the core commercials, the drill bit segment is commercially available in many sizes, often dubbed as the metric drill bit sizes. A general size based classification is as follows:

From 0.2 till 0.98 mm
From 1.0 till 2.95 mm
From 3.0 till 13.9 mm
From 14.0 till 25.0 mm

An example of further classification is like: N * 0.1 mm, then N * 0.1 + 0.02 mm and so on. Here, N is the integer from the first point to the second point (from 0.2 till 0.98 mm - here 2 is the first point and 9 rounded for 98 is the second point). This type of metric dimensioning is used mostly for Best Drill bits for Steel of all types