Drilling & Countersinking AR500 Plate Steel. This Is Some Tough Stuff!!!

***RUNOUT***. The runout you are seeing is the "Magic Chuck". It's a quick change tool holder. It allows tool change without stopping the spindle. They are great for a lot of things, just not carbide. Lol. My mistake and lesson learned.

We've drilled many holes in AR plates. We used a carbide hole hog bit. Then a counter sink bit. Using a mag drill. The hole hog bit only cut the periphery and left a plug. The cheek plates in most of our crushers were 3/4 thick and used 3/4 counter sink bolts. Good luck.

You know it is a big job when you're sitting on top of the work while drilling or machining it. Haha!

Used to drill a lot of AR500 plates for a mill. We didn't use any slugger bits, but we did try carbide on our 4ft carlton. The same thing happened when we tried the carbide bit. Snapped the bit on the first cut. Had luck with cobalt bits. You had to keep constant pressure on the bit. If you let the bit ride in the cut just for a second it would get hard fast and take the edge off. We did maybe 400 to 500 pcs at a time. A couple of holes my guys had trouble with, I heated with a torch and ran the cobalt bit thru hot. Had to keep the edge sharp. Yes they were a pain in the keyster.

Josh, Love your Channel. I have drilled Thousands of Holes in AR 500 Plate. This was our procedure. Using a Radial Drill or Mag Drill we ALWAYS first ground off the Mill Scale. This increased the life of the Cutter. We would always use a Cobalt Annular Cutter and a VERY GOOD Cutting OIl, Coolant never worked that well. The more we flooded it with the Oil the better it did. TURNING SLOW. Then used a Cobalt Countersink flooded with Oil. Not trying to Criticize but this worked for us and drilled thousands of holes

I drilled a lot of holes in AR500 plate with a mag drill and Slugger annular cutters. I've drilled holes in forklift forks with them. Countersinks were more of a problem. We found AR plate hardness to be too inconsistent so we switched to Astralloy EB450 plate. We had to torch holes and weld the plates down but they lasted 4 to 5 times as long as AR500.

Thank you Josh!

Just ordered some Anchorlube. Thanks for the heads up !

Allied spade drills are the most profitable thing I've bought for my shop. Far better split point and geometry than you can get with hand grinding drills, thru coolant, coated, and they'll out last a twist drill 10:1.

I always hand thin the web so there's as little rubbing in the center as possible. Reduces the feed pressure a lot. More harder the material, more shallow back rake helps too. Also, I NEVER use center drills but use Spotting drills for a starter, which are much more rugged and don't shatter the point. Center drills break unpredictably it seems. I only use them for center holes on the lathes.

Made a large bore in AR plate. Saw a perfectly round shadow in the side wall. It looked like a bearing in the melt, 😅. Tough job. Had a nasty small drill in hardened SStl. After pulling a lot of hair tried HS drills as a last resort. Worked. Live and learn. Thanks

I love my cobalt drills! Way to go.

wonderful Josh.......cheers from Rainy Florida, Paul

I used to make oilfield bitbreaker plates (they locked the drill bit so the tongs could screw or unscrew the the pipe from them) out of AR500 and A514. These plates were about 14x14 and had a horseshoe shaped notch in the middle about 7" wide for the bit to go in. We drilled the handle and lock bar holes with Iscar Chamdrills with thru coolant and did the machining with Mitsubishi feed mills for roughing and MA Ford 6 flute solid carbide endmills. We ran full flood coolant along with airblast to evacuate the chips. Stuff actually cut nice and would only kill the tools when you could not evacuate the chips fast enough. Nice work you are doing there.

I had the same problem yesterday trying to use a carbide drill on some stainless. I had 4 holes to drill and about 1/2 way through the second hole with a brand new carbide drill from Haas one flute on the carbide drill snapped off at the tip. Dang it those drills are expensive! I only had one of those drills on hand but since I had the job set up on my mill I was able to use a center cutting end mill to get the job done. Still frustrating to waste a brand new carbide drill. Good on you for taking on that AR500 project.

I have a tungsten tipped three-quarter inch annular cutter which I used to drill holes in a cutting edge for a excavator bucket. It was $200 20 years ago. Worked a treat. I still have it

Great video buddy thanks for sharing hope you’re having a great day god bless

A while ago i had to drill a lot of 3/8 holes in HRC61 material. My supplier provided me with a pair of carbide drills. His instructions were. Max out the speed on the drill press.(1200 rpm) Keep a constant feed rate,no manual feed.And certainly no coolant at all. The carbide went through the material like butter. I returned the second drill because i didn't need it.

Josh, thanks so much for adding the Anchor Lube at the end... guess I will need to get some Anchor Lube.....Cheers...PB

Hell ya Josh. This video was extremely helpful