As the drilling depth increases, the cutting torque increases and fluctuates, which can lead to the machine tool vibration, severe tool wear, and catastrophic tool breakage. Hence, cutting torque control is very important to improve productivity in drilling. In this paper, a PID controller was designed to control the drilling torque. The plant including the feed drive system, cutting process and spindle drive system was modeled for controller design. The Ziegler-Nichols method was used to determine the controller gain and control action times and the root locus plot was used to tune the controller gain for a certain cutting condition. Also, suggested was a simple method to obtain the tuned controller gain for an arbitrary cutting condition not using the Ziegler-Nichols method and the root locus plot. The performance of the designed controller and the effect of controller gain tuning were verified from experiments.