Drilling vs. Boring

I have to put some 5mm holes in a 6061 workpiece that’s about 12mm thick. I’ve programmed this to bore with a 1/8" two flute cutter, which works. But it’s slow.

I also needed to bore some 2.8mm holes with a 1/16" cutter, which was slow AND dicey, because they need to go 4-5mm deep.

Are these circumstances that would call for drilling rather than boring? If so, is there a drill chuck available for the Nomad3 to support various sized drill bits? Recommendations?

My understanding is that typical drills aren’t suited to spinning at the speeds which the Nomad can maintain torque in harder materials.

There are specialty mill-drills which may suit your application, but they tend to be pricey.

Have you considered our:

I’ve had excellent success w/ it in 6061 alu.:

(albeit in a Shapeoko w/ Carbide Compact Router)

I assume your Nomad uses ER11 collets, why not just get a set of metric collets?

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Yeah - that was my worry also. I can obviously slow the spindle down, but then there’s the question of torque. I thought maybe peck drilling, so the spindle could get back up to speed between hits, but that might be an overall slower process than boring.

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