Drill Press Technology Essay Example

Introduction

Initially known as a drilling machine, a drill press is a tool used to drill or bore holes through various materials. It evolved from hand tools that were used to drill and bore like the brace and bit. One of the most popular components of any toolbox, the drill is invaluable in countless manufacturing, maintenance, and repair tasks, in the industry as well as in the workshop and home. Drill presses have two modes of movements, the rotational and the breakthrough penetration. The rotational movement of the drill is made possible through transmission of pulleys and gears (Eustes & Alfred William 56). The breakthrough penetration can be done either manually or automatically depending on the transmission.

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There are several types of press drills, of which the basic one is vertical. This drill inherits its name by the vertical position in which its structure is arranged. It is a machine tool of great utility in the processes of manufacturing and repair of mechanical parts in large industries because it is together with the lathe, the milling machine, and the grinding machine, the tools that perform most of the operations in a mechanical workshop A similar, but smaller, press is the bench press, which is mounted on a table or bench instead of standing on the floor. Radial drills are composed of a wide horizontal base on which the fixed workpiece table is generally placed, with its guides so that screws can be placed in them to fix the parts to be drilled (Eustes & Alfred William 56). On the base rises a robust cylindrical column, on which it slides with movement, ascending and descending a horizontal arm, which is driven by a rack or screw without end. The arm can rotate 360 around the column, driven by another mechanism independent of the previous one.

Horizontal drilling machines have been developed to perform specific production tasks during manufacturing. This family of machines is manufactured for drilling operations in general with the spindle mounted horizontally. Most of the drilling is done vertically because it is preferable to have the help of gravity when advancing the bit, but sometimes it is impossible or inconvenient to place the piece for vertical drilling, then the horizontal drill is used. In the special machines of simple use, there are many advantages to the horizontal mounting of the spindle. The horizontal drill tends to facilitate the removal of chips and lends itself well to automation and to the design of drilling machines of the transferable type.

Another category of a drill press is the multiple drills which are a drill made up of a series of vertical drills connected in an online array. Each spindle is driven and operates independently, but they share a common work table So that you can perform related operations of serial drilling by simply sliding the working part on the work table of the following spindle. The multiple drills allow drilling and making blind and through holes. They are used mainly in agglomerate, melamine and Formica board. It allows drilling in vertical and horizontal because the comb with the drill inclines from 0o to 90o (AyalaCarcedo & FranciscoJavier 64). It can be equipped with a series of different multiples of bits, from a table with a comb of 21 bits to 35 bits. The drill bits will be separated from center to center between axes, in multiples of 32 mm. The range of multiple drills runs from the simplest with manual adjustments, to automatic drills with motorized input and output for large quantities in repetitive parts. There are also numerical control press drills to control the positioning of the holes in the working parts. These press holes are often equipped with turrets to hold multiple tools, which can be selected under the control of a numerical control program. The term control-numerical revolver drill is used for this type of machines.

Evolution of the Drill

The press drill was originally conceived as a rotating tool to which a cutting element (drill bit) was attached to make holes in wood, metal, plastic and other materials (Glynn-Morris, Trystan, Tom King, & Ralph 35). However, modern technology has advanced beyond these basic functions to result in versatility, thanks to the incorporation of various accessories or the design of new tool variants. Today, therefore, a drill also serves to screw or unscrew fasteners, sanding, sharpening, and grinding surfaces, and even to mix paint or mortar. And its models and applications can range from a simple and small bit like a corkscrew to an oil well drilling tower, covering disciplines as diverse as medicine or the aerospace industry.

Precisely because of this wide range of features, it is important to highlight that although many manufacturers include their range of new variants like screwdrivers, demolition hammers, impact wrenches and paint mixers in their catalog of drills, this article will only cover the drills destined to their primary purpose, that is, to drill holes. This clarification is necessary because, as we stated above, although a drill can be used to screw or unscrew a fastener or mix paint, a screwdriver or screwdriver or an impact wrench cannot be used to drill a hole.

The origins of the drill are very ancient, from the moment when a primitive man used pointed elements (possibly rocks) that he turned between his hands to make holes in materials such as bones, horns, shells and ivory materials (Glynn-Morris, et al. 35). With the passage of time, the rocks gave rise to the rods, and later appeared the arched drills used for centuries by the Babylonians and Egyptians to make fire and perform work in wood and stone. The first drill press was found in smithy and machine dealers. The first portable drill press was developed by Carl Fein and Wilhelm.

As the need arose to achieve greater torque to carry out more extensive and deep drilling boom began in the auger and old drills impact, then driven by waterwheels or windmills. For its part, the advances of the Modern Era saw the emergence of drilling presses, consisting of machines capable of raising or lowering on a material, allowing less force on the part of the user, and which would be the prototype of the current stationary drills and their various variants.

With the eruption of the electric motor arose the first electric drill, patented in Australia at the end of the 19th century. It was quickly followed by the first portable electric drill in 1895, which was perfected by another that patented the American firm Black & Decker in 1917. Like a hybrid between a revolver and a tool, this drill invented 100 years ago incorporated a handle and a trigger, design that, as we can see in the figure below, was already close to the current aspect and that would give rise, from then on, to the great revolution of portable electric drills.

The technologies developed during the Industrial Revolution were applied to the drills, which in this way were passed to be electrically driven and to be more and more precise thanks to the metrology and more productive thanks to new materials such as silicon carbide or carbide tungsten. However, in its architecture, the machines were preserved almost unchanged forms that had been tuned throughout the nineteenth century. The emergence of numerical control from the 1950s and especially computer numerical control from the 70's revolutionized machine tools in general and drills in particular (Glynn-Morris, et al. 35). Microelectronics made it possible to integrate the drills with other machine tools such as lathes to form computer-controlled multipurpose machining centers. The constant evolution of drilling equipment has found in battery tools, increasingly with greater autonomy, a substantial improvement in the processes for operators to avoid the use of cables in areas of difficult access and the advantage of being able to use the same battery, usually lithium ion, in other devices.

With the development of modern drills, the drilling process has changed drastically, because it is possible to drill a large diameter in a single operation, without the need for a hole or guide hole, and that the quality of the machining and accuracy of the whole avoid the subsequent reaming operation. Like all machining process by chip removal the evacuation of it becomes critical when the hole is quite deep, so the drilling is restricted depending on the characteristics of it. Greater depths require more concentration on the control of the process and the evacuation of the chip. All the drilling machines are characterized by some means of rotation of the cutting tool and the advance of the same along its own axis, within a stationary piece, to produce a hole of approximately the same size than the diameter of the cutting tool. The advance of the cutting tool along its axis is the most critical and the most important in the design of the drilling machine. Although this function can be performed mechanically, by hand, by means of gears, or by a hydraulic system, what makes it critical is the magnitude of the force necessary for the advance. Advancements in drill press features have led to efficiency in the manufacturing industries.

Works Cited

AyalaCarcedo, FranciscoJavier. Drilling and blasting of rocks. Routledge, 2017.

Eustes, Alfred William. "The evolution of automation in drilling." SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition. Society of Petroleum Engineers, 2007.

Glynn-Morris, Trystan, Tom King, and Ralph Winmill. "Drilling history and evolution at Wairakei." Geothermics38.1 (2009): 30-39.