Key Advice for Fabricators Sharpening Their Drills with Grinders

If you use drills a lot in your work operations, there will come a point in time when you need to sharpen them with grinders. You can have success using drill grinders if you just follow these protocols carefully. 

Don't Remove Too Much Material

When you go to sharpen your drill bits with a grinder, you're essentially removing material that's on the drill to expose a sharp edge. Make sure you don't take too much material away though, since if you did, that could compromise the structural integrity of said tooling.

You thus need to find the right balance when using a drill grinder. It can help to first examine your drill bits that have become dull to see how much grinding it would take to restore their sharpness in a meaningful way. Then you can be more strategic with how you use a drill grinder.

Let the Grinder Do Most of the Work

There are a lot of important rules to follow when using a grinder on drills for sharpening purposes, but one of the most important is letting the grinder perform most of the work. You don't want to dry forcing the drill bit into the grinding too much because that's going to potentially cause damage to the drill and potentially expose you to an accident that causes an injury.

Whereas if you take a gentler approach and just hold the drill bill at the right angle alongside the grinder, you can get better results and also feel better about this grinding activity as a whole for sharpening purposes.

Test Out the Drill

Once you've performed enough grinding on a drill bit that has become dull over time, you want to see how this grinding turned out from a performance standpoint. In that case, take the drill you just worked with and use it in real-time with a material. Then you can see just how sharp the drill is in a short period of time.

If drilling performance is optimal, you know the right amount of grinding was performed and can thus start using the drill without any reservations. Whereas if there are still things off with drilling performance, you'll know to keep grinding rough edges. 

If you have drills that become dull, the best thing you can do is sharpen them back up with a grinder. You just need to use this machinery in a strategic manner to get great sharpening results consistently.