Make small hole bigger with wood drill bits

Existing small hole needs to be bored to bigger size how to or
“How to make a small hole larger with wood drill bit”

The Problem:
You have an existing sized hole in a piece of rigid material, wood or metal and you need to make the hole larger. As long as drills have been around they have one thing in common, especially a wood boring drill bit. The drill bit has a point and flares out to the size that you have selected.

That means, with any experience in this area at all, that the drill bit will “wobble” in the hole having no boundaries to keep it in place, and more than likely, ruin the material you are working on, scarring the material possibly beyond repair.

You could clamp the material down to a drill press and get the under sized hole drilled out to the specific size you require. That assumes you can move.

But what if you have an existing door knob hole for the latch on something like a solid core exterior door? That may not be as easy a job to get off the hinges and underneath a drill press in a secure manner.

The Fix:
Make a template for the size that you are going to upgrade the existing hole too.

You should use material of a substantial thickness to ensure the drill bit will have a rigid boundary to eliminate the “wobble” effect of a drill bit that is not secured by a hard boundary.

Depending on the hole size, you could use a 1/4 inch piece of material for the template…other factors will determine if a thicker template material will be required.

Usually the defining consideration for thickness of material for making a template to drill an over-sized hole out of an existing smaller hole, is the depth of the bore.

The deeper the hole needs to be, the thicker the material may need to be to confine the shoulders of the drill bit as it bores the hole to the correct size.

Once you have your template material figured, then you select the drill hole size you require, select the bit of the required hole size and you now drill a hole with the selected over-sized drill bit into the template material.

You now have the template to make an over-sized hole from an existing hole that needs to be made bigger.

The rest is easy. Simply attach the template to the existing material that needs the existing hole to be drilled to another size larger than it is now.

Then drill!

This process of how to make an existing hole size bigger or larger can be applied to almost anything that you may encounter when a drill press just cannot be used for the over sizing of an existing hole.