Drill Guide

[Dan]

Did any of you ever see those cheap drill guides knocking about a year or so ago. They were plastics and stuckon the tile and the colours matched the plugs, so a translucent red drill guide would guide the correct drill bit on the perfect 90 degree angle through your tile preventing slipping of the drill, damage of the tile????

I looked around for them jsut but couldn't find anything.

It seems the modern and much more professional way now is to kit yourself up with the right tools. Diamond drilling 365 drills holesaws cutting porcelain granite wall floor tiles (no shameless plug here) have a newer more innovative range of tools in and the quote from Richard "We're giving Rubi and the likes a run for their money" is something we've needed for a while.

Should you spot the drill guides, give me a shout, should you need one, look for the more modern drilling systems for holes such as those from Diamond drilling 365 drills holesaws cutting porcelain granite wall floor tiles - our new friend Richard 🙂

 

[Paul Sh]

Is this what you mean.
eBay.co.uk: COMPLETE DRILL GUIDE KIT - NO SLIP UPS (item 280087601152 end time 27-May-07 15:58:36 BST)

 

[Dan]

That's the one! Can't understand why they are still out there to be honest. Anybody ever used one of those drill guides?

If you haven't, what do you do to stop the bit slipping?

 

[Paul Sh]

New to the tiling scene so never used or even heard of them until now, to stop drill slip i thought masking tape was the done thing.BTW,anyone think they are worth buying, or are they more of a gimmick.

 

[Deleted member 1779]

Yes that was the 1998 Ernie Merritt invention which he applied for and got a patent to protect and in force world wide.

You can see it [DLMURL="http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=EP0894560&F=0"]here[/DLMURL] at the patent office.

Although recently the patent has lapsed in a number of countries which you can see here and scroll down to the bottom the document.

Its taken us a year of development and we looked at Ernies kit. We saw that it is quite a limited gadget in that it only works for small bore drills 6 - 7 - 8 and was really only designed for twist drills in ceramic tile.

The big disadvantage is that it relies heavily on adhesive pads to stick to the tile which means each platic guide is a one shot job. Not very practical. And in tests we found the pads did not even stick to wet or rough tiles.

So we went off and did the battle of the patents and proved that our method used friction (not adhesive) via gel the pads so our solution is different and outside that patent.

Ernie sold to Plas-Plugs and in the year we were doing the development work on ours they were able to devlope and are just about to launch this.

PlasPlugs

What they did to Ernies stickers was to adda little water tank but the overall limitations of the original idea remain the same. IE: that everytime you press it to the tile you have to renew the sticky pad at the back.

Imagine if you needed to drill four holes to fit a cabinet. Thats four pad changes...

But the real killer for the idea is the drill sizes. Even after development they can only get it for up to a size 25mm.


In contrast even our basic kit with seven drills goes up to 40mm.

6mm - 8mm - 16mm - 30mm - 40mm

And we dont stop there we go up to a huge size 65mm for a plate and 125mm for a crown.


If you want a price comparison then Plasplugs are charging upwards of £12 per single drill bit.

In contrast 365drills charge £39.99 for seven drills. So plasplugs would be £84 (7x£12) and even then they dont go beyond 25mm so how would you be able to fit 30mm and 40mm items like errmmm - waste pipes! - Shower heads etc.

I believe we have them beaten on price, userbility, drill sizes, ease of use, simplicity of function.


Ernie was a smart cookie though and got his invention money.








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