[galvan]

I thought that at first, but the length of the hole is dependent on the width of the hole. The wider the hole, the shorter, because wider holes remove bigger caps.

With a sufficiently wide hole, you could indeed drill a 6" hole through a spherical Earth, it'd just look more like a thin ring the diameter of the Earth than a sphere.

[theophrastus]

i still get a confused language impression from that. for me it's the combination of "drill" and "through" (probably was forced to take too much 'wood shop')

i think it would be more clear to phrase it starting along the lines of: position a cylinder concentric and inscribed within a sphere ...