Drilling into Stainless Steel

[Thirsty Mallard]

I really want to install a spout on my hot liquor kettle and boil kettle and I am thinking of just taking my DeWalt to them...

What kind of bit do I need to drill a clean hole and not F- up the kettle? Do I need to weld the seals? Any great tactic to doing this?

[Ozbrewer]

drilling stainless is pretty easy, but you got to do it slow and stready so you dont get it to hot or it will go as hard as a school boy on prom night

[Push Eject]

Put olive oil on your hole saw while drilling and use the weldless fittings from Zymico.

[mexican]

Yep, what OZ said.

I drilled out a stainless keg a little while back and it was much easier than I thought it would be. Y ou don't need special drill bits to do the job. I specifically used el-cheapo bits because I didn't want to bugger up my good (read expensive!) ones.

Use a hole punch to mark the position of the hole. This helps keep the drill bit from sliding all over the place when you first start drilling. Then start drilling really slowly. Don't run the drill fast and put a lot of pressure on the drill. A good sign that you are drilling slowly enough and with enough pressure is that you should start to see metal spirals coming out of the hole. This means you shouldn't use a really small bit to start with. A smaller bit is more likely to break when you start applying pressure. If you are going too fast then you will see lots of little chips coming out. In effect you are using the drill bit to CUT the hole rather than chip out bits of metal to form the hole.

Just when you start to break through the other side turn up the speed on the drill and ease back on the pressure a little. This helps stop the bit from grabbing in the hole and twisting the drill out of your hand.

Its pretty easy stuff. Just take it slow. I remeber one hole I drilled I did too fast. The steel heated up and went so hard and I couldn't get through it. Buggered up the drill bit completely.

Another thing you can do is have someone spraying some lubricant on the hole as you drill to help keep the temperature of the metal down.

As to the spout, a quicker and cheaper solution may be to go with a weldless option. There are a few commercial versions or you could fashion your own from some silicon washers, stanless washers and various other fittings. Personally, I went the stainless welding option. Commercial weldless options were far more expensive than getting the thing welded professionally. A weldess option here was around $100 whereas I could get fittings welded in for $60 per hour and you could probably get quite a few done in an hour. I think I can now do the home-made weldless thing cheaper so that will be how I do my next round of kettle changes.

Hope this helps.

mexican

[Thirsty Mallard]

Helped very much, thanks!

Now the only question I have is... Mexican? In Australia?

[mexican]

Victorian actually. An Australian thing. South of the border. I live in Victoria which is south of the NSW/Victorian border. Much better than saying you are a sandgroper, crow-eater, or something like that. Thats what we call people from Western Australia, and South Australia. Dunno what they call Queenslanders which is, I tihnk, where OZ comes from. 'Mad as a cut snake' comes to mind

[Graham]

how about drilling into aluminum? any suggestions, things to take into consideration? recommend welded or weldless fittings?

[mexican]

Aluminium is a lot softer that stainless so there shouldn't be any problems drilling it. I don't think aluminium gets harder when it gets hot though, I may be wrong though.

If you have aluminium pots then I probably go with weldless fittings. Supposedly welding aluminium is a real bitch. Dunno, I've never tried it.

Weldless would be easier and faster to do because you don't need to get someone to do it for you and you can make up your own weldess fittings pretty cheaply.

A tip I saw somewhere on an aussie beer forum, I think, was to use those squishy silicon cake 'tins' that are all the rage now. They are designed to go into a really hot oven so you just cut them up to make very high temperature silicon washers to go between all of the fittings. Thus no need for th custom made weldless fittings that can be quite expensive. Whoever thought of that idea deserves a medal !

mexican.