Sooo my f4i has an akrapovic slip on. Carbon fiber. The ends of it are titanium. I shouldn't have wasted my time trying. I was going to cut it down a little and re-clear the cf because it looked weathered on the outside (the swingarm side looks brand new).

So, step 1: remove can

step 2: remove rivets and Ti ends. Ohhhh, that's why my steel drill bits are burning up. These rivets ARE titanium right? Or are the rivets aluminum and I'm burning bits because I'm trying to drill through the ti end cap on the inside (its basically a sandwich, theres a TI band, then cf can, then ti end cap on the inside all held together with a rivet)?

So cbrf, what do I do? Buy a handful of steel bits and go through them? buy a good one? heeeellllp please

 

subscribed!

i'd like to know what you find out.

 

yeah if no one on here knows I'll just take a ride down to the welding shop and see if they have any ideas and let you know

 

They are probably stainless steel, which is very hard, but not impossible to drill. You shouldn't be drilling into the can at all. Your drill bit should only be large enough to cut the external head of the rivet off, which would be barely larger than hole that is in the titanium. Once you reached the titanium, the head should fall off. Without knowing how larger the rivets are, you will want a drill bit that just barely removes the inside diameter of the rivet head. The center of the rivet is how larger the rivet rod is, which is just under the outside diameter of the rivet itself.

Go and buy a carbide drill bit and take it slow. Just be very careful as carbide bits are super strong and hard, but they are very brittle. If you catch the drill in the wrong way, you can easily snap the bit in two. But it will cut stainless well. Just take your time and keep the drill square to the rivet and you should be able to get them off. Oh, and don't buy carbide coated drillbits. they aren't any better than a standard HSS bit.

A regular HSS bit can cut stainless, but just a guess is that you were spinning the drill far too fast for stainless. The harder the metal, the slower you have to go. If all you can find is HSS bits, then they should still work ok, just go a bit slower with the drill. I'd also be careful with adding coolant to the bit. Some stainless material will actually work harden if you try to use a cutting fluid on it while drilling. If that happens, carbide is the only thing that will work.

 

When I tried today, my bit would take some material from the rivet itself but the bit would get stopped maybe 1/8" in. That's where it just spun and I couldn't get further. That's why I thought I might be hitting the end cap, but that doesn't make sense (since the rivet has to go THROUGH the end cap to hold it).

I'll go ahead and get a carbide bit tomorrow and give it another go

 

Grind them off if you can't drill them. Even a small grinding head on a dremmel will make short work of the job.
If you're going to drill, as justasquid said, use a slower cutting speed but do make sure that you've got plenty of pressure on the drill bit. If you don't make the cutting edges of the bit actually do any work all you'll do is blunt them. Cobalt bits work well in harder steels but are expensive. If you have a bench grinder you can always sharpen up a HSS bit when it gets dull. Save yourself some dough.
Good luck.

 

dremel for the win

 

...probably a dumb question, I know, but I'm sitting here at work (ahem), and reading this thread, and imagining all the dremel bits I have... but what bit do you use? The cutting wheel or the grinding? I'm trying to figure out which one would be the least risk of hitting the pipe, not just the rivet heads...

signed... "shaky hands"