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Reaming anodized parts advice needed. Size and reamer style.

Lock 45

Plastic
Joined
Feb 4, 2016
I have some 6061-T6 parts that will have to be anodized. The parts are wheel hubs or rims for electric slot racing cars. The anodizing will be for coloring the parts so it will not be hard anodizing. I need to create a 3/32" hole in the parts, that has no anodizing, for the axle to fit into. I was thinking of drilling a #43 hole, which is .089" in the hub and send it out for anodizing. When it comes back, I will ream my final hole size to 3/32".

What I wonder is does my math look right and what style and type of reamer would stand up to normal anodizing?

I will be reaming on a Hardinge DV-59. Should I run oil on the part or ream dry?

Thanks in advance,

Dan Miller

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Punching through the surface of Type II won’t cause any issues with any decent tooling.

All anodizing is hard, hard coat anodize is just thicker.

Edit:
Ahh, I miss read. Drill and ream after anodizing.

Or just go ahead run the hole ahead of time. Shrink is in the realm of tenths, if you can live with that.
 
That poor reamer is going to have to chew through the AlO layer all the way through the hole, not just at the top.

Make the holes to finished size, and ask your anodizer to mask the holes. This is SOP for such things.

Regards.

Mike
 
Last edited:
^^^^^^ What Mike said. Plating shops plug holes all the time to avoid this sort of problem. Even carbide reamers wear out very quickly on anodized holes.
 
When we rebuilt parts built by others, we reamed the originals with carbide circuit board drills. These were .7, 1.0 and 1.3mm diam. We did use cutting oil. On parts we made from scratch (2024 T4) we drilled to size with precision micro drills and held tenths on the ID. You get less build up in small holes and we controlled the finished outside diameter also in tenths by matching etch time to anodizing time. Holes caused not one issue in 10 years production of 100,000s of parts.

Our experience drilling tenths out of parts for rebuilding the HS drills quickly went undersize. Maybe leaving more material to drill or ream out would not abrade the outside edge of your tools as fast.
 








 
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