Last evening I dug out an old gate that came with my rural property from my scrap pile. I planned to take this thing to the recycler several times but never did. Last evening I had a pony break his fence, and it was too late to buy anything. It turned out this old gate was made to fit the situation. The only problem is that one end did not have a hole drilled into it to run a wire thru it so I could wire it to the post. This homemade gate is made out of some sort of extremely hard angle iron. I'm thinking it might be old bed frame iron. I had to drill that 1/4" hole, and ran my battery powered drill battery dead and barely left an indent in the 1/8 inch thick steel. I got my plug in drill and I must have run it for 15 minutes and had only penetrated the steel about 1/32 of an inch. The bit looked sharp when I started, but was dull by that time. I got another used bit (of unknown quality). That one turned bright orange and the end of it melted. Frustrated, and not having another bit that size, I grabbed a
5/16 carbide tipped bit intended to drill concrete. In less than a minute I went thru the steel with little effort. I never thought that concrete bits worked on metals (steel / iron), but it worked great and did not show any dullness after drilling thru this extremely hard steel. Has anyone else used these bits on steel?By the way, the gate worked great. Its only a temporary fix, but I'll keep this gate now. Now I know why farmers keep everything. One never knows when a piece of junk will come in handy.
Alvin