Drill Bits
I have drilled thousands of pen blanks using a drill press and occasionally a lathe( metal for extreme accuracy) I include Snakewood, Corian and one of our hardest to drill Hairy Oak. Never had a drill wander, always use DeWalt Extreme 2 HSS-G 7mm for Slimlines and get a huge number of drillings from each bit and at around 5 Aus Dollars each never have considered sharpening on a cost per drilling basis. The drill is made in the USA after all and has a small actual drill point, was designed to drill stainless steel, has a hex cut stem, no slipping in the chuck.
As a home metal worker it gave me an increased awareness of accuracy and a very high expectation for lathe accuracy and engineering. My conclusion is we expect too much from our wood lathes in the accuracy department.
With my Taiwanese Bench Drill the first thing I did before Wood Pens were in my mind was to replace the crap bearings that came with the drill, chuck the cheap motor and install a
1HP 240 volt motor. When I did this work on the drill press I spent over a day really accurately setting up the table,drilling vice etc to provide some certainty of operation. I drill a couple of hundred pen blanks at a time no trouble , no exit disasters, no plate of wood to meet the drill coming through. I note as an electrician in a former life electric motors have a specification of just so many stops and starts design in a particular time and to avoid the surge of current every start up prepare the blanks beforehand, leave the drill on continually and do a batch at a time. I bought hundreds of spare brasses to enable me to do this.
Now in case you say he must have very accurately cut blanks far from it most all my blanks are cut on the bandsaw with no ruled lines across the grain nearly always and to follow the grain patterns best. I use an XY axis vice that gives movement front,back and side to side, the vice has three vees in the vertical position and one full vee in the horizontal position so later I use the vice in the horizontal grip with the glued up blank after facing by eye on a disk sander to ream the face using a step drill reamer I bought many years ago.
Lest you think this is obsessive whenever I do something repeatedly I try to simplify and dedicate equipment to do the job. I make no business from wood pens live within my limited funds as an age pensioner aged nearly 75 yrs old now and having fun making pens.
Now I envy the tremendous oportunities in America with your large population and great mail order methods with every known contact at your fingertips compared with the scattered population etc and twenty odd million inhabitants in a country about the same size as yours in America.
Regards from down under and enjoy coming into better weather as we swing into winter soon.
Peter.