How to accurately drill a side hole in a round workpiece

Sometimes in the manufacture of various homemade products, it is necessary to drill a hole that is ideal in accuracy of location on the side of the tube or rod. To do this without preliminary preparation and tools will not work. The main difficulty lies in finding the geometric center of the future hole. Below we will consider one of the ways how to do this in practice.

Necessary tools and materials

We will need:

• hacksaw for metal;
• bench drilling machine;
• punch and hammer;
• collet chuck;
• center drill;
• conventional twist drill with a diameter of 2.5 mm;
• vice metalwork and mobile;
• aluminum rod with a diameter of 10 mm;
• a piece of coarse sandpaper;
• cutting fluid (coolant).

The procedure for drilling a transverse hole in the workpiece

There are many ways to do this. In our case, we use part of the rod itself as a conductor, having previously processed it.
1. Clamp the rod in a vice and use a metal hacksaw to cut a small piece about 20 mm long.
2. Insert and hold the sawn part of the workpiece in the drill chuck with the cut side down.
3. We put sand paper on the table of the drilling machine and, holding it with our fingers, turn on the machine spindle and press the end face of the core piece to the sand paper until an even and smooth surface is formed.
4. Using a punch and a hammer on the end face of the workpiece of the future conductor, mark the geometric center.
5. We reinsert and clamp the workpiece in the chuck of the drilling machine with the face-down face down.
6. Then we fix the mandrel of the collet chuck in a movable vise, hold the center drill in it and expose it, moving the vise, exactly under the poked place in a piece of the rod.
We turn on the machine and finally determine the place of the future through axial hole, which we then finally form with a 2.5 mm spiral drill.
7. We put the rod in a bench vise, and on top of it we put perpendicularly a cut piece of the same rod with a central axial hole, a kind of conductor.
8. Securely clamp both elements in the jaws of a movable vice. Pour a little cutting fluid into the hole. We center the homemade conductor by moving the vise relative to the drill and drill a hole in the side of the workpiece.
9. By changing the position of the conductor cylinder on the rod, you can make any number of transverse holes, if necessary.