Four reasons to own a bit-brace.

so i'm a hand tool guy but when i go to drill holes i typically use an electric drill because obviously and for years i never owned one of these it's a traditional bit brace and i would read articles about them and see videos on them and think to myself no i'm not going to get one of those because i'm not fred flintstone [Applause] [Music] it's easy to think that this is just an old way of doing things and that it's obsolete and i'll be honest most of the holes i drill i use an electric drill for but now that i've got a couple of these i actually use them and i use them more than i would expect and i think if you work with wood in pretty much any way you probably should own one of these and i'm going to give you four good reasons why reason number one bit braces are cheap and extremely common in the time i've been collecting tools i have literally seen thousands of these things and sometimes they're as cheap as a dollar and they're so common because before electric drills existed bit braces and the little egg beater drill this is how you drilled holes they were the only game these tools worked back then and they still work now so if you're on a budget it's a great tool to have it's also good if you don't have electricity don't have electricity how are you watching this now once you have the bit brace you also need some bits to go in it the bits for these are called auger bits and they have kind of a spiral shape with a little screw sticking out the end and that's called the snail these are also extremely common but often you don't find them in great shape it's easy to find singles for 25 cents or 50 cents but they're rusty and they need to be sharpened and that's a whole process what you really want to do is wait until you find a set it doesn't even have to be totally complete even a partial set is good especially if it's cheap i've been lucky enough to come across two full sets of auger bits at reasonable prices and you should keep your eye out for those but in the meantime a standard bit brace will fit any bit that has a hex shaped shank so a really good alternative to augers is spade bits they're a little bit slower than auger bits especially in hardwoods but they're inexpensive they're sharp and they work really well i will link to a good set of cheap spade bits down in the description and because the chuck on any bit brace will grab anything with a square or hex shank you can just get bits with hex shanks these days pretty much everything comes with a hex shank so it's not very difficult to get stuff that'll work there's also a kind of bit brace that has a cylindrical chuck and this is called a universal chuck and it'll hold even cylindrical things like twist bits or forstner bits now i have one with universal chuck but i can't find it i i hung it up so i'll link to an article down in the description and you can read all about the different kinds of chucks we don't need to get into it now grab a universal chuck or get bits with a hex shank and you can use anything you want in your bit brace and since bit braces usually cost a couple of bucks maybe as little as a dollar i'm not even going to go into a whole long conversation about condition or features or whatever if you see one and it's a buck just buy it take it home figure out the rest of it later reason number two and this is a little bit obvious but bit braces do not require electricity now these days cordless drills are reliable and relatively inexpensive so for most of us there's no reason not to own one but for me woodworking isn't just a hobby i do woodwork and fabrication professionally which means sometimes i have to go on installations which i hate because i have to be out of my shop i don't have access to all my tools and it's very difficult for me to think of every last possible tool i might have to bring with me sometimes i forget stuff if you work in the trades and you do installs i guarantee there's been at least one time where you went to a job and you either didn't have the drill didn't have the battery or didn't have the charger that can be a real problem you could waste huge time going back to your shop to get one or even worse if you're very far away you might have to go out and buy a cheap drill just to get the job done and that's awful if you're out on an install and you're working with softer materials like wood or sheetrock and the battery on your drill goes dead having one of these in the truck or the tool bag seriously might save your ass reason number three bit braces give you incredible sensitivity while you're drilling holes the great thing about modern drills is they have a lot of torque but on the other hand they have a lot of torque and this can lead to problems for instance you might suddenly break through the material that you're drilling unexpectedly and then mash your hand into something sharp like a piece of metal i've done it and i've gotten some bad cuts that way if you're drilling wood you might break through the other side before you realize you're going to and then you can have ugly torn grain and splinters on the other side of your hole sometimes especially with larger drill bits the bit might bind in the cut and then jam and then you might either wrench your arm really hard or the bit could snap off in the hole and that creates all sorts of problems obviously none of these things are going to happen with a pokey old bit brace there's no motor there's not enough torque to cause these problems but the other part of it is that while you're drilling you get this unbelievable sense of feedback in your hands the vibration and the resistance tells you everything about what's going on inside of the hole you can actually feel the individual wood fibers being sliced by the bit and that means if you hit a knot or a piece of hardware you'll have plenty of warning plenty of time to stop pull the auger out and figure out what's going on before you damage anything another thing that'll happen when you're drilling through a piece of material is all of a sudden you'll be going along and it'll get much much easier and what's happened there is the snail in the auger bit has broken through to the other side and that reduces the resistance a lot when you've done that go ahead and pull the bit out you're going to have to turn the bit brace in reverse to get it to come out cleanly and flip your board over on the other side you'll have a nice neat little hole where the snail poked through stick the snail back in restart the auger bit give it a few turns and you will have a perfect crisp hole on both sides of the board so if you're doing something like fine woodworking where you can't afford to have a bad breakout the bit brace can be a much more delicate and controllable tool it might preserve your work and save you from making a bad mistake the last reason you should have a bit brace on hand is for drilling holes at a precise depth now we've all done the blue tape trick when we're using a twist bit but that trick doesn't work nearly as well with larger drill bits when you're using a spade bit or a forstner bit or an auger bit there just isn't a really great place to put the tape and so you need a different method of making sure you're going down to the right depth the bit brace has a good solution to this problem because you're doing the revolutions by hand and each time you turn that handle you're going down exactly the same amount so as a test on this piece of pine i'll put the auger bit against it i'll turn the handle until the snail bites in and until the auger wings start to score the surface then i'll count four revolutions when i pull the bit out and measure the hole it's almost a quarter of an inch deep that means in this wood each revolution of the brace gives me about a sixteenth of an inch depth so if you're working on a piece and you need to drill a lot of large holes at a specific depth you can do a couple of test holes measure the depth and then just remember the correct number of revolutions every time that you drill that hole and do the correct number of revolutions on the brace you're going to get exactly the same depth it's surprisingly precise so the next time you're out at a tag sale or a flea market and you see one of these for a buck or two bucks grab it and bring it home you're not going to use it all the time your cordless drill is way better for most applications but there are a bunch of little situations where nothing beats the good old antique bit brace and if you've been watching my videos you might have noticed something there's no sponsorships there's a really good reason for that no sponsor is going to pay me money to make video about why you should use a bit brace instead of buying their fancy schmancy new cordless drill that's just not a good business model tool companies want you to sell tools and they're the only people who would sponsor a channel like this anyway and i just don't think that's my job i think my job is to entertain people and inform them and get them into craft work if they haven't been doing it before my job isn't to hawk tools for big companies so i've got patreon it's the way that i fund this channel without sponsorship without advertisement and without taking free tools from manufacturers my patrons make my work possible by giving me a little bit of support each month to make these videos and in return i give them early access to my videos blog posts book reviews articles about things i'm working on sneak peeks all sorts of stuff in fact i recently wrote a book called one week to woodturning you've probably heard about it because i mention it all the time well i gave that book away free to all of my patrons just to thank them for their support so if you'd like to get in on any of this stuff you'd like to support this sort of content go over to patreon.com rex krueger and check out the different rewards i've got available to my patrons they're the ones who make this stuff possible and for everybody who's watching thanks so much for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 286,898

Keywords: drill, drill driver, screw driver, bit brace, drill holes, depth, woodworking, auger, auger bit, spade bit, drill bit, forstner bit, blowout, splintering

Id: tTch3KE_Aio

Length: 9min 42sec (582 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 13 2019