Abstract: The scope of the residual stresses determined by the hole drilling method should not exceed one half of the material's yield strength. But this method is used to determine welding residual stresses in many cases where the stress peaks are often near the material's yield strength. The reliability and precision of the blind hole drilling method for determining high residual stresses were searched in this paper. For simulating the real process of determining residual stresses in engineering application, the calibrating method was taken. The operations of bonding strain gage rosette and hole drilling ware taken under the loading condition and the relaxation strains were measured. The results of experiment show that the data calculated with ths measured relaxation strains are in good agreement with its calibrated stresses and the largest absolute deviation is 21 MPa.