Drilling rusted screws

[toprecyler]

Curious to know why you think rust would affect a drill bit.

It’s just a decomposed layer of the base metal that is less than paper thin.

Hmmm, just when you think you know it all, something makes sense.

It just hit me thinking about times when I had to work with rusty metal. It may be drilling, sawing, sanding/ grinding. But whatever work, it always seems harder on the tool life.

It will depend on the rust encountered, just a light coat, or heavy flaking away. But rust heavily dulls tools, IMO.


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[RaisedByWolves]

In my experience I never felt rust was a factor in dulling drills or any cutting tool. Being curious, I gave a quick search and could not find anything supporting rust as an abrasive at least not in a tool dulling capacity. Crocus cloth may have some very fine abrasive qualities, it's like 6000 grit, but that wouldn't dull a drill IMHO.

This may need to be merged with the HF drill set thread.

Millscale on hot rolled is known to be measurably hard, and I've drilled through it a several dozen times with the same bit and never noticed any degradation in the drills performance. Quite the opposite actually as I've routinely just put the bit back in the index and never even gave it a 2nd thought.

I'm thinking this is more a matter of perception, Ie, rust bad, must be bad for your tools, rather than factual. A reverse placebo effect if you will.

Then again I may find out tomorrow I've been dulling my cutting torch all these years by just blasting through the .003 layer of rust.