How To Sharpen A Drill Bit

hey guys it's well Pemble and as you can see I'm having a little trouble drilling through this this piece of metal here um and the problem is is that my drill bit is very very very dull and that's what happens to drill bits when you use them when you use metal to cut through metal the metal sometimes rubs off on the other metal dull drill bit this drill bit here is like I think it's like a 5/16 or maybe a 3/8 drill bit I think it's a 5/16 drill bit which I use a lot of and they probably cost about ten bucks so when one gets dull I have two choices I can buy another one for ten bucks expensive or I can sharpen it so let me show you how to sharpen a drill bit when you go to the hardware store what you're going to find next to every single drill bit display that I've ever seen is you're going to see down on the bottom shelf right off to the left of the right of the all of the drill bits that you could buy um you will find a drill bit sharpening kit and it's got a little attachment and some special things and doohickeys and it takes up space on your workbench and they usually cost about thirty bucks do not buy that drill bit sharpening kit here's the trick all you need to sharpen your drill bit is a grinding wheel and maybe a little fancy kind of a jig thing that you can build for yourself but you probably don't even need that so let me show you what's going on here when you look at the end of a drill bit if you look at this angle that goes across the top here this angle that kind of matches along my fingers there what you see here is you see about a 118 degree angle now the reason I say 118 degrees is on my drill bit here which is kind of beat up it's not exactly 118 but just about every drill bit has a 118 degree angle across the top the other thing that's important to know about a drill bit is it's this edge right here this one little spot right here that's what makes the difference that's what does the cutting and all of this stuff down here all of these threads down the side there they don't really get that dull because this is the business end of the drill but so all we have to do is restore that perfect 118 degree angle on the tip of our drill bit and we've got essentially a brand new drill bit because there are basically two facets or two angles on the tip of the drill bit what we need to do is we need to figure out what we're going to do with that 118 degrees so that we know what angle to hold our drill bit against the grinding wheel to make this all come true so we'll do a little bit of math 118 degrees we've already decided we've got two angles here so half of 118 is 59 59 degrees now if you think about the grinding wheel like here if you think of this is the end of your grinding wheel and we're holding the drill bit at 90 degrees just like that but we really need to get a 59 degree angle what we want to do is we want to take the rest of the difference between 59 and 90 which is 31 so basically what we want to do is we want to figure out a way to hold the drill bit against the grinding wheel at a consistent 31 degree angle and then what we want to do is we want to rotate the drill bit a little bit as we move it across the wheel and I'll show you how that works if you're lucky or if you shop well you'll find that a lot of grinders will come with that 31 degree angle already built into one of the grinder decks and with that you can then very easily and without any extra effort of any kind set the drill bit inside that routered out spot and then rotate it as you grind it along the grinding wheel and that's how you're gonna that's how you're going to sharpen the drill bit let me show you how that's done also want to keep in mind if you can control the speed of your wheel you want to kind of have it go a little bit slower than you might you don't want to have it going on full speed because the drill bit is actually pretty soft and you don't want to grind it down any more than you have to so now what you see is kind of something completely different right we've got really really sharp edges particularly right here which is where the drill bit cuts into the metal that's really sharp if I were to pull that across my finger I would totally cut my finger which I won't do but I'll have to take my word for it so that is really simply how you sharpen a drill bit so one other thing like I said a lot of a lot of grinding wheels mine has this little trough already built into it so it's really easy for me to find a 31 degree angle so that I can sharpen my drill bits all day every day and this drill bit is as sharp if not sharper than when it when it just came out of the package right so it took me a little while to make this video it took you a little while to watch this video you can sharpen your drill bit in way less time than it took you to watch this video if you don't have a grinding wheel that's got that 31 degree angle built into it you can make a jig you can make a jig with a router you can make a jig by gluing a couple of pieces to another piece of wood and just setting it here what I did was I just 3d printed a little jig because I've got a 3d printer which is awesome and so I just designed one I measured this up I designed this little jig now what I can do when if I don't have that is I just set this in there and it's that same 31 degree angle right and then this one just slides right on to my grinding wheel on this side and then I can just hold it and spin sharpen my sharpen my drill bit right so if you have the means I would definitely pick up a 3d printer because the world opens up in ways you wouldn't believe so that's kind of one of the one of the cool things about 3d printing and one of the really cool things about being able to keep your tools sharp and well-maintained and not having to just spend all the money in the let's see how it works like bada so learn how to sharpen your drill bits it's worth every bit of the ten minutes it will take you to figure it out thanks for watching I'm will Pemble thanks for helping me bring physics family and fun to kids everywhere please subscribe and like and share especially subscribe and like and share I'll see you soon

Channel: Will Pemble

Views: 414,328

Rating: 4.7290654 out of 5

Keywords: Will Pemble, Drill Bit Sharpening

Id: Xxl8_rSaJVI

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 31 2015