hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a tool tip that blew my mind and came
from a good friend uh okay you are a hobby machinist like i am and you've
got a big chunk of aluminum like this this is uh about five three quarters of an inch thick
and you want to put a hole in it that's this big what are your options
i'm just gonna let that keep going what are your options for a whole
like if it's not me it's not my alarm it's just somebody out on the street
what are your options for making a hole this big in a piece of aluminum like this
i'm here to tell you that it's a pain in the ass uh you could go and get a really big fat billy bit
like this one uh but these things are scary especially for hogging out big holes man they'll
take the tip of your finger right off i've seen it happen not to me i'm not naming names but these
things moving that much material that fast it is tiring so uh you could also go in drill a hole and
do a jigsaw ah but with material this thick you're gonna use your scroll saw you're gonna use a
milling bit and then a boring bar to carve it out every option for making that hole in the home shop
is exhausting except for this new tool that i've recently found and it came about because my friend
john knoll the effects director of mandalorian and many other films in the star wars universe uh john
is a highly accomplished uh home machinist and said dude you've got to check out annular cutters
and i was like you know what i came across that word about two months ago and i've been trying
to remember the word annular because every other search term i tried to use for this kind of cutter
did not yield what i was looking for and when i saw it i was like those look really
interesting and john literally texted me out of the blue to say annular cutters are amazing
and with his say-so i bought a set and this is an annular cutter and i'm here to tell you that
an annular cutter makes cutting a hole this big in a piece of aluminum this big an absolute pleasure
it is so far from terrifying it is actually almost delightful you can purchase these singly or
in a set here's a set that i had that i purchased that seemed to carry to me most of the big sizes
i would want these are most frequently built for mag drills drill drills you would use a
magnet on to attach to big pieces of steel for construction work and then it would automatically
feed this cutter through the hole but and and when you do that they actually come they have an
internal hole they come with their own mode of lubrication they come with a holder that feeds
lubricant to the cut but when you're working in your home mill you don't need any of that and
i'm about to show you just how easy it is to cut a big fat hole with this and i'm going to use up
this piece of aluminum just to demonstrate it it's not like i'm uh you know given a value valuable
material this already spent a long time as a clamp for something else and it's got holes in
it this way and holes in it this way and there's not a lot of useful meat left in this chunk so
we're gonna use it as a demo chunk all right i'm gonna set a couple of parallels here
and get that why you keep falling over
okay my piece is in actually i think i think i could give you a better angle on this let's see
okay so here is the annular cutter r8 holder and actually i could also you can also just
chuck them right into your standard r8 collet this is a three quarters of an inch shank on this
oh yeah you don't need to see that bright light okay so i'm gonna put this in
now the key with an annular cutter is you don't want it to go too fast
so i'm going down to like 900 rpm on this and i may even go slower i'm also going to break out
some cooling fluid um get this positioned up top and uh i'm also very well might use
yeah i'm gonna use my quill feed on this but first i'm gonna get you a better angle
all right there's my annular cutter and it's going and i'm just going to start feeding it
in
uh
all right i don't want this bird's nest so but i'm going pretty slow on this so this isn't like
heavy duty uh swarf this is actually almost like tin foil and i just right there with
listen the quill feed here is not meant for high pressure it's actually meant for gentle pressure
and yet with just a few turns look at how deep i got already yeah we're on okay so here we go
okay
yep there she blows look at that just chewing it up no chatter no whistling
and we're through
look at that this isn't even too hot for me to touch which almost any other cutting method i did
would you would actually make this super super hot that is a beautiful
beautiful finish on that cut and this is a very sexy very sexy bit
so why is it so amazingly good why does it make that cut so cleanly and without any of the normal
noise and fire and brimstone of using a big ass bit like this well specifically because
this is actually moving and removing less material than this is even though it's cutting a much
bigger hole i'll make it clear this way here's the plug that came out of the annular cutter
there is what the actual cutting that it did this is cutting away a one inch wide piece of aluminum
as it's a lot of atoms to move around that is a lot of material to carve and that is hard on a bit
it's hard on a machine it creates a lot of heat and that heat makes it worse
everything about trying to move this much material is rough but the annular cutter is only removing
what's going on here on the outside and it's got these one two three four five six seven
eight nine ten eleven twelve blades doing that cutting simultaneously and it's got it's got
this sharp and leading edge on these spirals that is what helps make that beautiful finish on the
side of the cut because it's using it's removing less material the material itself gets less hot
the cutter lasts longer make sure you use cooling fluid but my life has been changed by these things
i hope yours will be too as always with every new piece of equipment read as much as you can
up on it be careful go slow use lots of cooling fluid all the normal all the normal caveats apply
but i am very happy to have as i've said before on this channel making holes is one
of the most common and frequently one of the more difficult things i do depending on the
size of the size and location and material that hole might be made out of and annular cutters
these aren't for handheld drilling really not they're not even really for drill press
drilling i don't think i would even try to get this into my drill press uh
i need the precision of a mill to utilize these but when i have it oh man what possibilities
these open up thank you john and thanks you guys for watching uh i will see you next time
bye