Cheap Twist Drills

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

I recently purchased a set of very cheap twist drills of the Dekton brand from a local discount warehouse, not expecting much but intending them to only be abused on 'DIY' jobs, used as a disposable item and just slung in the electric drill box with the rest of my old drill and masonry bits that have seen better days and so chewed up most are not worth sharpening. However, I have to say that I am quite surprised by the new bits' quality, especially for the price. They are of HSS (well that's what it says on the packet), seem to be accurately sized and very well ground. I have just drilled 200 x 4.5mm holes in rough mild steel angle iron with one of them in the drilling machine, plus quite a few larger ones, and the bits cut very freely with no sign of the edge dulling as is usually the case with cheap carbon steel drills. I am so impressed that I have bought another set and put them in a spare metric drill stand that I had under the bench. I would think they will obviously be of far-east manufacture but even so they appear to be very good value for money at £7.99 for a set up to 10mm.

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

[Ady1Participant @ady1]

The stuff I got was so bad I gave up. A "cobalt" set I got was unbelievably bad, some of them were only good for drilling round corners and one pinged into pieces like glass

Lidl stuff is passable basic hss but decent drills just go and go between sharpening

The really big difference is when I hand drill steel, it's so much easier. I've been using a teeny 1/8 dormer for pilot holes for a bunch of jobs over the last month and it hasn't even needed resharpening

Straight accurate holes up to 13mm have never been so easy… once I got sensible

And when you put them into the lathe huge curls of steel peel away from the workpiece, luxury.

I've also salvaged every old imperial dormer from every nook and cranny in the garage and placed them in their own dedicated rack, those guys are valuable nowadays

Sounds like you got lucky to me, well done you

Edited By Ady1 on 03/08/2023 02:54:07

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