Poor quality drill bits

+1 for GBR Engineering, reliable supplier of good quality tooling.

Emgee

Pro Star and UK Drills share the same geographical address. Their websites look different, but the category list on the left hand side shows the same categories in the same order.

Bill

I am very surprised to see the negativity towards UK drills, l have always had good service from them and regard them as my "go to" supplier. The only 'dud' l have ever had was a carbide tipped dril which shed it's tip first use.

Oh the service was good but the drills themselves were not!

Tony

Thanks for that, their prices look pretty good. 😉

Have used UK Drills on a number of occasions and the drills that they supplied were always sharp and cut true so no complaints. In my days when I worked on aircraft we used to have to have to frequently sharpen drills by hand, took a while to become proficient but there is no way I could manage to hand sharpen an eighth drill nowadays, hands not steady enough and eyes becoming a problem so with small drills tend to buy new rather than attempt to sharpen nowadays. Dave W

This brings back old memories. I have been travelling throughout China since 1986. Back then, foreigners were issued with FECs rather than Renminbi Yuan. Here is a link to the FECs which is an interesting short read about official and unofficial values which prevailed at the time. Later after removal of FECs, standardisation took place, and foreigners could use RMB - Renminbi Yuan when visiting China. For foreign trade however, companies wishing to buy from China in RMB have to jump through hoops to open a CNY/CNH Chinese Yuan account. RMB/CNY/CNH mean the same thing, with the same foreign exchange rate. Have a look at the video in this link. We do some of our buying in USD and some in CNY. Although we have CNY account, very few Chinese companies are permitted to conduct foreign business in currency other than USD. If we had a choice, we would conduct all our Chinese business in CNY. This would make ARCs life easier because we would only have to think RMB/GBP conversion rather than RMB/USD/GBP for costing.

What your friend said is correct in many ways. The issues are a combination of many factors. In the 1980s I used to go to cities, towns, villages to source fabric and dyes for printing, and large bearings for steel mills. The cotton fabric I used to buy was made from a mixture of American cotton blended with Chinese cotton, technically proven to be better than any Japanese, Korean or India product which purported to be better, based on ‘marketing’. Similarly, the dyes were far better than Bayer or Ciba. The large bearings for steel rolling mills would compete against Russian or Torrington or FAG offering. The biggest issue was branding - or rather - lack of it, but at the same time, the great thing was that most of these factories were were/are in hard to find locations, with poor marketing, or poor political backing for various reasons.

Back then, I used to travel by Russian/China collaboration trains, old Dakota planes from very small airports - it was cheaper and faster to travel this way than the train back then, because there were more plane crashes so the locals were nervous. I also travelled by army equivalent of jeeps driven by very rough drivers going through small villages in the forest at speed running over the odd chicken, duck or something along the way. Some of the locations were in restricted areas located statically for MOD requirements.

Nowadays, most of them have collaboration JVs with the very same American/Western/Japanese companies with whom they competed.

The first city I visited was Guilin - famous for its game food. They had a Holiday Inn (Hong Kong franchisee) but I couldn’t afford to stay there back then, plus, I am a vegetarian, so interesting times were had. KFC was only in Beijing and the only thing they served vegetarians back then was smash potato. Milk, sugar, salt were difficult to find. Visiting the first Pizza Hut in Beijing in the first week of its opening in 1990 was a fascinating experience. The Chinese didn’t know what hit them. They found everything expensive and didn’t really like the cheese.

Nowadays, one travels around China on bullet trains, with McDonalds and Pizza Hut in every major city, with queues forming outside to get in at peak time, and Chinese restaurant offering for vegetarians has come a very long way.

As far as this business is concerned, I have visited factories which make components as well as finished products for well known brands. Due to certain agreements, it would be wrong to disclose such brands. These factories have state of the art tooling combined with old machinery, and they all supply to customer demand.

DMB thought that the high quality products were restricted to supply within China. This is true - but only to a small extent. High end tooling is mainly made for CNC / High End blue chip factory requirements. In turn, this is already very expensive. Rest of the world demand for such tooling is far smaller than within China. The tooling factories will supply anyone with the right credentials - local or export at a price, with or without branding. The right political connections or the right friends are required for the purpose of purchasing, along with the right attitude, rather than money.

For example, I kept knocking on the doors of certain factories who wouldn’t give me an appointment, let alone supply. However, they all opened their doors to certain buying agents which we use, without hesitation due to their old friendship when they all started at the bottom of the ladder back in the day. Now most of them are factory owners or holding high positions. A case of who you know, and the right introduction.

Continued…

The hobby market cannot afford to buy the super high end drill bits the Chinese manufacturers produce for their high end CNC production users. Having said this, it is next to impossible to promote their well known China brand in most overseas markets, as they are not known in the West, or they have JV collaborations. ARC therefore sells HSS TiN coated Chinese drill bits to compete with rest of the offering available in the U.K., followed by Cobolt (better than the general TiN coated), and a known brand - Dormer. Our cobolt range is close to or on par with Dormer - depending on application. We can get better than Dormer from China, but I am afraid that the marketing required to promote the product range would be exhausting and the demand would be too limited for both the factory and ARC to consider.

For un-branded premium Chinese, our carbide inserts are procured from a factory which has state of the art Swiss made production facility… I could eat off the floor… if I was allowed to, but I couldn’t because the production facility is inside a temperature controlled ‘clean room’ environment with special overalls and feet covering to be worn. ARC purchases less than 1% of the range of types and sizes they make.

For endmills - we offer the standard TiN coated end mills, and we offer the Premium ARC branded end mills made by a factory under a Joint Venture agreement with a well known Japanese brand. Again, unfortunately I am unable to reveal the name of the Japanese JV partner to piggy-back off for the marketing, nor is it possible to reveal the Chinese JV partners name for reasons of competition. The end mills we purchase again represents less than 1% of the range they make. Normally, they would not entertain ARC, but again, a case of the right introduction by the right person, at the right time opened that door.

In the mid 1980s, the Chinese government made it a policy that if any foreign company wanted to sell its product in China, they would have to make the product or most of the product in China. That policy included majority of the components to be made in China. That is how VW, Nissan, Toyota, Tata - Land Rover / Range Rover, Mercedes-Benz, and similar, came to create manufacturing operations in China. Having said this, the cost to buy all these vehicles within China is more expensive than the west, and the equivalent models are better specified in China. Within Beijing, due to the pollution, any new car purchased can only be driven in Beijing for limited X number of years, after which they can be sold off to people outside Beijing.

Ketan at ARC.

Ketan - thank you, that was fascinating.

In respect of tool branding this is vaguely connected with the theme of this posting, my electric drill, a Bosch corded hammer drill has finely been rendered u/s. Problem is with the keyless chuck, it continually comes undo whilst using the percussion facility, this chuck is the second one on this drill, it replaced the first because of the same problem. I decided to look for a corded drill that comes supplied with a keyed chuck, not much choice available as the fashion is for keyless chucks nowadays. Found a suitable replacement, Amazon had a DeWalt with keyed chuck reduced from £130 to £87 so I purchased it and received it today, most impressed with its looks, hope it performs as expected, anyway the purpose of my posting is that when you look at the country of manufacture both the Bosch and the DeWalt are made in the People’s Republic of China, so much for perceived origin of both brands being in Germany. Dave W

I have my go to sets of drills.

The Dormer are split point tin coated tapping size drills. Taping drill size, drill size , and clearance drill for M3 to M6 screws. The second set are Presto 1mm to 10mm size by 0.5 increments and both sets are good lasting quality drill. Sets.

David

I think most of Dormer's drills come out of Brazil though quite a few are made in India. These days it is the quality they are made to not where, even dormer make several types, the split point coated A002 mentioned above is their better HSS drill.

Just a quick thanks to whomever suggested GBR Engineering for Osborn drill bits.

I broke the 2.7mm diameter drill bit in my Trend drill guide, (a sprung device used with a hand drill to locate a screw hole exactly in the centre of the holes of a door hinge or lock plate etc. when drilling into the wooden frame or door.

Normal drill bits are too short for the device, but Osborn carry longer ones.

Price is very good and the ordering and paying process was very easy. Hopefully they will arrive tomorrow, and I can continue fitting the internal doors !

I still have stocks of Dormer/Esicut etc from 30+ years ago and am glad of it having heard of some of the offerings now available

The trend stuff is usually imperial and would have been 7/64th (2.75mm), they do them as spares

I agree with Jason, it's the quality HOW not WHERE. If you see modern factories on TV these days making almost anything you would be hard-pressed to tell where they were located if you hadn't been told. The kit / CNC / robots all look the same and usually look very well organised. If it wasn't for the physical characteristics of the occasional worker wandering about or signage you wouldn't have a clue.

British branding is irrelevant these days & has been for years. In essence, IMHO a lot of it simply depends on what you are prepared to pay, regardless of where it was manufactured.

Hi Jason, yes you are correct. However, Trend do not list these drill bits as spares - they only list a kit of three complete units - I only need the drill bits - and they haven't answered my email.

So.......tricky.

My Dormers and Prestos have shown me that I'm actually quite good at drilling, and they last for ages too, even when hand drilling

10 years of cheese...wot a muppet

Edited By Ady1 on 04/09/2023 13:02:20

John, Trend Direct UK have them though may take a while to get through 5, plenty of others on google do them too if you search that part number such as Isaac Lord and FFX. They are long shank rather than long flute that standard extra length drill bits are.