What are the gun drill and gun drilling?

The origins of modern-day gun drilling have their roots in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The arrival of more powerful propellants led to the need for stronger, more dependable steel barrels. Within the modern metalworking industry, The tool has become a significant process for the end-use industries to improve their efficiency and profitability.

Gun drilling is now a highly developed and well-organized technique for producing either deep or shallow holes in a wide variety of materials.
The tools can make holes of an exact particular size, with precision tolerances, create burr-free holes. It can also be used with special formed shapes in blind holes for bottom forming with the least amount of machine revisions.

Gun drills are straight fluted drills that allow cutting fluid to be injected through the drill’s hollow body to the cutting face. Modern gun drills use carbide tips to extend the life and decrease total cost when compared with metal tips. The speed of drilling depends on the material being drilled, rotational speed, and the drill diameter; a high-speed drill can cut a hole. There are two basic types of gun drills that are the internal chip removal type and the external chip removal type.


The internal type is mainly a tube with a cutting bit on the front. Coolant is strained around the outside of the tube, and pours around the front of the drill, forcing the chips through the hole in the tip, up through the shaft, and out which is more common to BTA deep hole drilling. The external chip removal bit has a notch cut in the outside of the drill tip. Coolant is forced down through the hollow tube and forces chips to exit along the notch. The external chip removal is more common in most gun drilling applications. These types of bits may also differ in the coolant hole.


Any precision drilling requirement is to use appropriately designed tools with a machine system that has been designed, engineered and built for the purpose. A machine designed particularly for precision drilling, from the ground up, avoids design weaknesses typically inherent in traditional equipment adapted for this technique. A gun drill is a precision tool, designed to create high quality, close tolerance holes. The machine setup should remove the necessity of the judgment from the operator, permitting the tool to accomplish the results for which it is designed.

What are the gun drill and gun drilling?

The deep hole boring machine equips the gun drill tool.

Drilling is one of the most common methods of metal removal. It is estimated that almost 75% of all metal cutting material removed comes from drilling alone. Gun drilling is one of the most commonly used techniques for deep hole drilling applications. Within the modern metalworking industry, gun drilling has become an important process to improve efficiency and profitability. The augmenting demand for fabricated metal products and the development of the heavy equipment industry will drive the market growth in the forecast period.


According to a secondary source, gun drills can relatively easily re-sharpened by the user, up to 60 times. This has increased the use of gun drilling machines in many of the industries. In addition, the capability of producing burr-free holes has majorly driven their demand. The gun drilling has many advantages over STS and ejector systems such as they provide good surface finish and close tolerance of the machined holes, can be used for holes with small diameter (about 1mm), long-life, ease to change drills of different diameters, and many more.

Effective, efficient production of deep holes can present a number of challenges. To produce a quality final product while keeping costs under control, the end-use industry must be able to achieve accuracy, repeatability, and sufficient surface finish while continuing a predictable tool life. Holes in the particularly small range present additional challenges associated with more common depths and diameters. Usually, workpiece dimensions and shapes result in thin walls and non-uniform sections, with extreme accuracy requirements, and demanding a consistent, reliable process in order to produce successful parts. Gun drills in this variety of diameters require additional support to sustain rigidity, and process development is vital for developing ideal drilling speeds and feeds. Control and feedback of the operation are critical.

APPLICATION

As industry-specific demands continue to increase, so does the need for new application processes that have resulted in huge advancements in gun drilling machines. The engineering has led to the development of extremely sophisticated machines that are at the cutting edge of advanced gun drilling applications. The demand for small-drilling with a less diameter in a range of small diameter is increasing in industries such as electronics, aerospace, medicine, and automobiles, due to a significant acceptance in the use of miniaturized products and devices.

MARKET

The Asia-Pacific is estimated to be the fastest-growing region for the global gun drilling machines market owing to the presence of several manufacturers in the region and rapidly growing industry demand. Of the Asian countries, China is the pioneer in the gun drilling machines in the market and holds the highest market share during the forecast period.
The increasing production of the automotive business in Japan will increase the demand for gun drilling machines. Since gun drilling machines are a sub-segment of machine tools, the growth of the global machine tool market will have a high impact on the gun drilling machines market. According to a secondary source, a machine tool purchase is on rising since 2017 and is a global boom. The countries such as China, the USA, Germany, Japan, and Italy were the leading consumers of machines in 2019. However, the market consists of several regional manufacturers giving tough completion to the global players of the market.