Carbide drills or heat treating?

[Eric T. Maier]

Hi All,

I am trying my hand at knife making and have a couple of questions. I am going to start by making just the handles and use an existing blade from another knife. I need to enlarge the pivot holes to 3/16 and want to know the easiest way. The blade is hardened 420 stainless. Should I try to remove the hardness, drill and ream with standard HSS bits and then re-harden or use carbide bits to drill them out?

Thanks for any help.

Eric

 

[RHINOKNIVES]

use the carbide bits. BUT make sure you put the sharpened blade at about 10:00 oclock on the drill press and clamp it down on a board. other wise things get real exciting when the blade spins around and slices your fingers

 

[Eric T. Maier]

Any suggestion as to what style of carbide bit? I have seen carbide tipped, solid carbide and spade style.

Thanks,

Eric

 

[L6steel]

Something you might want to try thats a little less dangerous and costly are carbide demel bits. They make one thats cone shaped with lots of little ridges so it's less likely to grab or shatter and the big end is a tad bigger than 3/16" You can get em at most any big hardware stores like Ace or Lowes and they're just a couple dollars where a carbide bit would be $10-15.

 

[Andrew McLurkin]

One other possibility is using a chainsaw file(s) working up to the desired dimension. Some tangs are still fairly soft and chainsaw files are pretty aggressive.