Drill

A drill is a tool fitted with a cutting tool attachment or driving tool attachment, usually a drill bit or driver bit, used for boring holes in various materials or fastening various materials together with the use of fasteners. The attachment is gripped by a chuck at one end of the drill and rotated while pressed against the target material. The tip, and sometimes edges, of the cutting tool does the work of cutting into the target material. This may be slicing off thin shavings (twist drills or auger bits), grinding off small particles (oil drilling), crushing and removing pieces of the workpiece (SDS masonry drill), countersinking, counterboring, or other operations.

Drills are commonly used in woodworking, metalworking, construction and do-it-yourself projects. Specially designed drills are also used in medicine, space missions and other applications. Drills are available with a wide variety of performance characteristics, such as power and capacity.

History

Around 35,000 BCE, Homo sapiens discovered the benefits of the application of rotary tools. This would have rudimentarily consisted of a pointed rock being spun between the hands to bore a hole through another material. This led to the hand drill, a smooth stick, that was sometimes attached to flint point, and was rubbed between the palms. This was used by many ancient civilizations around the world including the Mayans. The earliest perforated artifacts, such as bone, ivory, shells and antlers found, are from the Upper Paleolithic era.

Hand drill (hieroglyph)

A Hand drill is a hieroglyph, (and tool), used in Ancient Egypt from the earliest dynasties. As a hieroglyph, it can also be used as a determinative for words related to the profession of vase, bowl, pot-making, etc., typically from fine-grained, colorful rare stone, for example unguent jars. The size of drills was small-to-large, small for small unguent jars, and large for more massive, grain-storing pottery. The original jars found in tombs were more often used for ceremonial usages, presumably the reason they are found as grave goods or tomb offerings.

Hand drill hieroglyph and tool explanation

The hand drill was a vertical type of weighted, and counterbalanced boring bar, (used today in horizontal lathe-work boring, for example: rifle tubes). The hieroglyph shows the weights used as pictured on temple reliefs; the weight of the stones does the tool work, and the artisan simply supplies the rotational motion of the tool, for boring the hole.

Of note: with the weighted device, the Egyptians were performing a lathe operation long before the invention. Instead of the lathe-(massive metal: weight and forces) doing the work, essentially the Egyptians were using a form of a vertical lathe-using gravity-weights, with the boring bar doing the cutting.