lol yeah there was once that I took a drawing down to the machine shop and it had specified a .04" inch hole drilled down to like an inch and a half, and they laughed me outta there. The general rule is you don't drill deeper than 10x the diameter, for every scale, but especially very small bits. Also, isn't it weird that our brains really seem to tolerate 3D CAD where the view is zoomed in, but the perspective is still like that from infinity? I hope that makes sense. Like always using binoculars, y'know? So maybe I missed this, but is this all for watchmaking? Or general application? Or moreso just for the journey? Looks like so much fun.
It's called gun drilling and about all I know about it is what the rep at IMTS told me when I looked up and saw a 3/8ths drill bit whose business end was eight feet above me. The "gun drilling pavilion" was not huge? But it was not small either. I'll bet you can do a 1mm hole 40mm deep (I've been doing enough metric that I'm starting to think in it!) but not without planning and tooling up. Now I'm really curious as to what that hole was for... I learned engineering fundamentals by taking apart cars from the age of 6 so underneath all the theory is a Cargo Cult understanding of mechanical objects. "I have never seen that hole, therefore it is impossible" without ever learning any 10x rules. I've harped on this before - we see 3d through the way things move as we move our head, not through stereoscopic vision. Stereoscopic vision really only carries out to things about 6 feet away. When we're looking at a monitor, the image doesn't move - but with my magic puck I can move things around exactly as I want them whenever I want them and my brain builds 3d. Usually you hold down the center button but I found that limiting, so I bought a puck. Jeron Lanier made the point that humans adapt to any control schema really quickly; for my brain, "twitch my fingers" easily substitutes for "move my head." This is all for jewelry making, but those jewels will run towards watches, pens and accessories. At a certain point, any precision assembly or surface needs to be machined rather than filed or cast or sawed or whatever. I got to the point with the casting where I went "and nothing will go together without things being precision drilled" at which point the question became "so how are you going to do that." This machine cost me about $9k for the husk. It's been about another $15k for parts (fully $7k of that was rebuilding the spindle - yeowtch!). It will, if things go to plan, perform about as well as this thing, which I was quoted $180k for. It will also have a working envelope easily 3x as big in every direction. And, because I am controlling it with a highly-configurable Windows-based CNC interpreter, I will be able to do obnoxious things like configure it as a 5-axis drag knife, which is a device that no one in the world has ever made.
It's precisely this kind of shit that keeps me coming back for more updates. I don't even know what a 5-axis drag knife is... but hanging around you Ima bout to learn... I will be able to do obnoxious things like configure it as a 5-axis drag knife, which is a device that no one in the world has ever made.
So "drag knife" is not the correct term. The correct term is "tangential knife". This is only relevant because it is how engraving works. "Engraving" in watchmaking is a barely-automated process called "engine turning" everywhere but the US, where "engine turning" means something else entirely because of course it does. The first lathes in europe were actually for "ornamental turning" and it was very much the sport of kings. When applied to jewelry, this is called guilloche, a made-up word much like "karaoke" or "boba" that is foreign but with an extremely muddy etymology. So muddy in fact that half the world (and it is an exceedingly small portion of the world) says "gee-oh-shay" and the other half says "gwee-osh." Guilloche sucks. I've done about 30 hours training on it. I hate it. Note that I also hate the wire-bendiness of cloisonne, but love the paint-by-numbers of it. Solution? mechanize that shit. This is a Bumotec S191V. It's yours for a mere $750k. But it can be tricked into doing mayhem. And, for roughly $25k out the door, so will the FrankenKern. (fingers crossed)