How Small Do You Grind ?

I started free hand grinding my own drill bits a few months ago. Not out of choice, but out of necessity. Since I started doing it I have reground a fair number of them. Sometimes the same one two or three times in the same set of jobs. Now I have old eyes, but my glasses are pretty good, and I have a magnifier lamp I swing over my bench grinder. It allows me to free hand better than I ever thought I would be able to.

I've also resharpened some of my stub length Silver and Deming bits. That's where it really pays off. I bought a set of those some years back, but I've never seen them available singly. The 5/8 took quite a beating over the years since its the standard injection port size for hand injecting plastisol. I actually make injectors .620 and sprues .63, but sometimes you just have to brute force a solution. It was nice to finally be able to just sharpen it right up.

No more piles of drill bits to be sharpened someday. I just sharpen it right up and drop it back in its spot. Which brings me to the other size limit.

The smallest I've reground so far was a #21. I picked that one to push the smaller size limit because I have several of them on hand. I ordered a half dozen of them once from McMaster in stub screw machine length to drill molds for 10-32 clamping screws. It came out ok. I'm not sure how much smaller I could grind free hand. Probably not much. I was squinting a bit at it and gritting my teeth. LOL. So how small of drill bits do you free hand regrind. I don't have a drill doctor or a Darex or a knockoff. Just a bench grinder. Well a couple of them and a small belt grinder now.

I think one of the limits is grit size, but another would be heat. It would be really easy to overheat a tiny little drill bit.

Reply to
Bob La Londe
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I got a Drill Doctor at a metal club swap meet a few years ago. If you follow the directions, they work pretty well.

I think the lower limit on them is 3/16" or maybe 1/8"

My attempts at free-handing a drill bit were disappointing at best.

BobH

Reply to
BobH

I quit hand sharpening drills ( poor eyesight & shakey hands). Got a Brierley TC-32 sharpener. Tried the darex stuff, sold the darex stuff. With the brierley I can sharpen drills from 1/16 to 2" in about 30 seconds. For drills smaller than 1/16 i use a sellers drill sharpener.

Best Regards. Tom.

Reply to
Howard Beel

The instructions are pretty weak at best, and you can end up with some really weird an nonfunctional bits even if you "follow the instructions". At least you can see if they're all jacked up and just keep trying with different amounts of "touch" until they look about right.

I got some 1/8" bits working again with the drill doctor. Never bothered with smaller ones yet, although they will chuck up OK.

Same here. The drill doctor hasn't paid for itself by any means yet but the box of trashed bits is now a box of bits that just don't belong to an index, so that's handy.

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

Back in the day, just for fun, I could grind a .0625 to cut onsize, then split the point.

Reply to
wws

I've been quite happy with my Drill Doctor and have had some success with 3/32"

Reply to
Gerry

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