One of our customers with a special three spindle drilling head is having
some problems. They went out and bought a drill press that can not get the
RPM / thrust settings right for a particular drilling process they need to
run.

Rather than buy a new drill press, they bought some tooling that can handle
the higher feed rate per revolution.

The head is being used to drill 2 holes at 0.326" diameter and one hole at
0.218" diameter. The material is stainless steel and their machine makes a
lot of thrust. They can not reduce the thrust or increase the RPM unless
they buy a new drill press and of course, they are resisting that idea
because the drill press they would need to buy (probably a used Bridgeport
actually) costs much more than the head I sold them.

The bearings inside the head do not last very long because they are being
pushed way past their thrust ratings. Because of the close C-C spacing,
there are no larger bearings or "stacked" bearing options available to me at
this time without actually building them a brand new drilling head. They
are open to this as the fault here is clear - they need the proper machine
to drive the head...

But... Before we go down either the new and more robust head route or new
machine to drive the head route... I'm wondering if there are any bearing
experts out here who can tell me whether there are any specialty bearings
that take higher thrust numbers or even vibration better than a typical ABEC
1 bearing. I was thinking ceramic, but I don't think they would take
vibration very well... We were thinking of going to higher ABEC numbers on
the bearings but I'm not sure that will help either s it shows higher RPM
ratings, but not much difference in thrust ratings.

Before anyone asks, we can't change the input/output RPM of the head to
compensate either. If I could simply have the inpututput at 1:2, that
would solve it, but there is no room for the gearing inside their footprint
to do that...

Random thoughts from the wild welcomed! We have two solutions as noted
above, but the customer would like to avoid both if possible...

Regards,
Joe Agro, Jr.
(800) 871-5022
01.908.542.0244
Automatic / Pneumatic Drills: http://www.AutoDrill.com
Multiple Spindle Drills: http://www.Multi-Drill.com
Flagship Site: http://www.Drill-N-Tap.com

V8013-R