Home made tool advice

[Gitface]

Hi All

I've been making some home made tools and have come a bit stuck.

So far I've made a 2mm parting tool from power hack saw blade, this was 24 inch long so I have plenty left for a few more tools.

An Oland tool, one is a short handle, about 18" and I'm going to make a longer handle for the other.

Then I decided to make a swan neck with interchangable bits, using some of the hack saw blade. So got the shaft all bent in to shape, turned a handle (currently letting glue dry) and started work on a tip.

Cut off a bit of the blade and rough shaped in the the grinder then went about trying to drill a hole to attach it to the swan neck

This is were things went down hill, found a drill bit that had the right diameter and got it in the drill press. Clamped the bit up and then started to drill. The drill did not touch the bit, in hindsight I'm not surprised, it one of the things I need to do is restock on drills.

So there I am scratching my head when I remember that I have some diamond tip grinding bits with my dremel want-to-be. Off I go and get them and have a go. Things started fine until I noticed that the tip hand stoped cutting. Looking at the tip, it had worn smooth.

So the question is what type of bit do I need to drill my high speed steel.

PS. I was planning on posting pics with a write up of how I made them once I'd got them all done

Cheers.

Mark..............

 

[CHJ]

....So the question is what type of bit do I need to drill my high speed steel. .....

Cobalt,

but I doubt your hacksaw blade is HSS more likely a high carbon tool steel.

To drill you need to soften by:

Heating to cherry red and allowing to cool
Drill
Re-harden by heating to cherry red and quenching in oil
Polish- then reheat to dark straw/brown colour and quench to temper it.

Personally would not expect material the thickness of an industrial saw blade to have enough strength to act as anything other than a light scraper, would expect it to behave more like a chatter tool assuming it did not fail.

 

[duncanh]

I have some planer blades that are made from incredibly hard HSS.
I've had some success using the carbide bits designed for cutting tiles but they don't last very long. When the engineer in our club tried to drill some holes for me we ended up blunting several of his carbide bits. He said he'd never come across HSS that hard.
Next time I want to make a large scraper cutter I'll try cutting slots instead of holes (like the Siragas scrapers at the bottom of the page) - I've found that the blades cut quite well with thin grinder cutting discs from Screwfix.

Duncan