Drill bits

[Northeast Rod Run]

If you look in a machinist supply catalog (MSC is a good one), you will see plenty of good ones (Made in USA, Cleveland Twist Drill, Guhring, Chicago Latrobe, etc). From here you can step-up to cobalt or carbide. Hell, even their cheap import ones are better than most anything you will get from Snap-On or Mac. This is where most machine shops get their supplies from and it's not worth us messing around with inferior drills.

Even when you see "titanium coated" drills out in the regular stores, those are usually inferior drills with the cheapest and thinnest coatings possible. You can usually even notice how uneven and poorly coated those drills are compared to if you saw a high quality drill. A lot the same "usual" places that sell the cobalt and carbide drills usually sell cheaper ones also. They might seem pretty good to you, but there are many different grades and mixes of those materials in the drills, and again, if you buy from a real industrial supplier instead of a tool supplier (Snap-On, Mac, etc) you will see the big difference

While we're on almost the subject, how about taps?

Greenfield, Guhring and OSG are great taps and the tool guys stuff can't compare. Their stuff is much more powder based than the ones I mentioned. I just had to go bail out one of my mechanic friends a week ago becaus ehe was trying to tap out a hardened bolt cutter (I still don't understand why he was doing it). He broke too many Snap-On taps so I went to his shop with just a couple of beat-up Greenfield taps and took care of it for him. He now understands why I always tell him the his taps are crap and I wouldn't tap a piece of wood with them