Has anyone tried to put a small micro drill chuck onto their Nomad spindle? I ran into an issue of having to drill about 100 small holes. The drilling tool in MeshCam doesn’t have a way to “drill” with a small end mill. So, I had to manually set machining boundaries for each hole after the initial roughing pass and run a separate job with a small end mill to bore out those holes. It was a bit of a pain.
I looked around and there seems to be a few 1/8" shank micro drill chucks that can hold something like up to 0.040". That’s way too small. I’d like something up to 1/8" drills.
I was thinking about making an adapter for my Dremel keyless drill chuck with a 1/4" shank and a 1/8" through hole, so I can put drills up to 1/8" in the chuck. And still be very low profile. The total length of the drill + chuck can’t be too long, since it would eat into the z-travel in the machine.
There I go, overcomplicating things again. Great idea. I often forget that ER collets have a wide clamping range and can hold various diameters accurately. I’ll make an order for some ER-11 collets. Thanks!
True, but I already have a full set of HSS jobber drill bits. No need for them to go to waste.
I don’t particularly like 1/8" shank drills because you can’t drill deeper than the flutes and the shank can get in the way, if you’re drilling close to a wall feature. With normal drill bits, you don’t have clearance issues and can drill deeper, up to the chuck or collet, as long as you retract the drill often.
