Drilling Titanium

As we all know, titanium is cool. Its probably one of the coolest metals introduced into watch making. I have been working with various alloys of titanium for about five or so years now. 6AL-4v titanium is a monster on a short leash. Turning and milling operations usually go quite well, but drilling and tapping... Eeeek! Titanium, in this case 6AL, is known to be a "gummy" metal. It tends to take the tap in a thread or two then... snap! It can only be done with very specialized taps with special high tech coatings. In this picture, a drilling operation is done before the hole is reamed and tapped.. by hand.

Denis-