Cheap Chinese forstner bits review: Low quality but they drill ok.

three months ago I made a short video about making this drill index for these cheap Forstner bits I bought from China and a whole lot of people competent I should review these drill bits and with a new baby I don't really have time for project videos right now so here goes so this drill bit set cost me 28 dollars Canadian that'd be about 20 dollars u.s. and they came in these flimsy containers there's 16 of them and they're supposedly high speed steel and on close inspection you can see that there's extra bits of metal that were braised on to the corners here plus the main cutting edge and if I try to file that the file just glides right off so this stuff is pretty hard metal and doing a spark test on it with a grinder I can tell it's not high carbon steel so it probably is high speed steel but of course what really matters is how well do they drill so in this piece of hard wood I did get a little bit of tarrant on the edges let's try a different Brad Pitt so this is a really high quality bit of similar design and I got a bit of a chip here too i also slipped with a drill a little bit that's better and now a different size of the cheap ones just to try more than one for this so that came out pretty clean and another cheap one so this whole was with a high quality drill bit and these ones are with cheap drill bit and looking at it this is pretty clean this is quite clean too this one's a little bit Messier this one almost is clean it's really hard to tell the difference and in the three months I've used these drill bits I haven't really had any complaints about them they're cheap drill bits but all things considered they work pretty good and the close-up comparison between the cheap ones off of Amazon and a high quality drill bit these little side cutters here are much smaller pieces than they are on here and the longer these are the better that is for guiding to drill in the hole so having that longer is better but the small ones do the job and also this is much shallower than this one so much better built for the fancy drill bits but these ones drill okay but there's other types of Forstner bits there's these ones with the little insects and then there's these ones which are just on one solid piece but the thing is these ones are not nearly as hard they're just high carbon steel and actually they will file so a file will engage these quite nicely which is to say they're not nearly as hard as the metal inserts on these ones and these ones actually these came out of a pretty cheap set that I bought from Canadian Tire they're inch sized bits and if they actually out of the box they weren't even all that sharp so this one I've had to sharpen and you really do need to sharpen these before they make a clean hole this is another cheap Forstner bit this one again doesn't have any inserts and there's a bit more like these ones and this one cost a little bit more it came sharp it has nice teeth I quite liked using these but I'm pretty sure these probably won't stay as sharp as long as these ones because again these are made out of softer metal drilling in softer wood can make that tear out situation worse so this was with a nice drill here which has got this sawtooth on the edges and that drilled a nice clean hole in here whereas this one it's really aggressively it got pretty messy in here let's try that again but drilling more carefully so that's much better still a little bit messy edges compared to with this drill here but much better than when I was leaning on it hard I think I see now why this one drills messy these things here are supposed to kind of pre score the edges so that these things don't make a mess of the edges but just drilling a really shallow hole I can hardly see that these parts here did any sort of pre scoring so maybe this one's just a little bit defective in that these things are too far back let's try the next size so there you can see the the main blade hadn't actually started to cut the surface but these scoring edges have really cut a groove in here to make for much cleaner edges so even leaning on it really hard with this one it makes a much cleaner hole but I've noticed something else I'm not sure if you noticed it I put that in here notice how this metal part goes back and forth as I was drilling the shaft seemed to wobble back and forth [Music] and there's something just a little bit off balance here and I haven't used all these bits before so I hadn't actually even noticed these problems yet but let's look at this in terms of let's line this corner up with that corner of the piece of wood here and let's turn that 180 degrees and look at that we are now a millimetre and a half short of the edge of that piece of wood so there's a serious precision problem here essentially only only this one is pre scoring and the other one is set way back and if I move that so it touches the wood it's still ahead of this cutting edge let's make this cutting edge touch yeah there's some serious precision problems at least with this particular one here and looking where the main cutting edges are those seem to be pretty consistent between the two of them so it's just this one here that's that way too far back and going back to the one I had before we can see that the scouring edges are actually further back than the main cutting edges so they're not doing any good at all and more comparison holes this with the low quality Chinese bit this with another cheap drill bit this one again is just high carbon so won't stay super sharp but the hole is nice and smooth mind you I did file this one at some point and this with a high quality drill bit again a very nice and smooth hole and again here this is high quality drill bit smooth hole cheap Chinese bit bit messy hole but again the the cutters on here are not set properly and this is with another one from a cheap drill but mind you this set was not as cheap as these ones and I bought this one 20 years ago and this one also cuts quite clean so I have to say I was actually fairly satisfied with how well these drills drill until I had a closer look at them just now so what I recommend you buy a set of drill bits like this actually yes because having a whole bunch of extra drills that are in really small increments can really be handy sometimes of course these shouldn't be your only drill bits you should have some drills that drill cleaner holes for other applications where it's visible and you don't really care about the size that much it all comes down to you get what you pay for and a twenty eight dollars Canadian or about twenty us there okay value for the money you

Channel: Matthias random stuff

Views: 88,893

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: drill bits, forstner bits, chinese, cheap drills

Id: iWvvanKAbSc

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020