What's new
What's new

sorting piles of drill bits

ag2886

Plastic
Joined
Mar 26, 2014
Location
Seattle, WA
Wrote this program to ease my own shop cleanup woes but after some prodding from a friend I put it on the internet for anyone else to use freely at DrillSizer

Just select the drill indexes you are sorting into, enter the diameter in inches, and it will save you a trip to the big eye chart to figure out which bit it is, giving you a list of possible bits and the difference from their nominal sizes.

It currently searches for anything within 0.005" of the entered diameter, and if it finds multiples will show anything within 0.002" of entered diameter.

works best with SPC calipers, I use the inexpensive bluetooth ones connected to my phone and prop it up on the drill cabinet, but any SPC caliper will do.

also works for well for sorting random piles hex keys, just uncheck the letter and number indexes.

its a hobby project, it will probably get better over time with better instructions, more options, checkboxes for all the odd-ball form tap drill and such. but it already saves me a good chunk of time and annoyance and I hope at least a few of you might find it useful too.

DrillSizer

party on.
 
i don't get it.how is taking more time to enter something quicker than just glancing?

what if the boss won't let you use your phone at work
 
Wow! that sounds space age. When do I get the rows and rows of racks and the Amazon robot to go get them for me... maybe delivered by drone...

I'm used to saying f*** you Santa...I wanted
A huot drill index .

If I were in a situation , where I were forced to deal with that
Nonsense .... I would grab the closest bludgeoner hammer..
Beat the scanner to a pulp

If you are disorganized enough to
Have any sort of pile of random tools... An excel spreadsheet is
Probably not the issue. Get a job
In a real machine shop for the
Two days before they throw you out, and take notes.

Your system probably works better in pharmacies but not in machine job . shops. And how exactly does that program sort tools from the pile?
 
If you had a few drawers of loose drills this would be handy. Much faster than finding reading glasses to read the markings on the shank and then looking it up on multiple charts.
 
If you had a few drawers of loose drills this would be handy. Much faster than finding reading glasses to read the markings on the shank and then looking it up on multiple charts.

uhhh .... i guess ? how again are these piles of unnamed tools to be recognized again.... do thay somehow have
upc bar codes...or laser stuff.? radio tags?? i know? "GOOGLE...WHERE:S MY LETTER_R_ drill , " In THE FUCKING
DISORGANIZED MESS YOU'VE CREATED"....?????

it is currently a piece of toolsteel. no antennae or nano-chips to discern from "a pile of drillbits"

better: discern a crimnal asshole from "a pile of humans" now, that would be something.
 
uhhh .... i guess ? how again are these piles of unnamed tools to be recognized again.... do thay somehow have
upc bar codes...or laser stuff.? radio tags?? i know? "GOOGLE...WHERE:S MY LETTER_R_ drill , " In THE FUCKING
DISORGANIZED MESS YOU'VE CREATED"....?????

it is currently a piece of toolsteel. no antennae or nano-chips to discern from "a pile of drillbits"

better: discern a crimnal asshole from "a pile of humans" now, that would be something.

Seems like someone didn't just take a whiz in your Cornflakes this morning, but had an elephant take a dump, too. What the hell is your problem?

The OP has a clever little program that works with a SPC caliper and a cell phone to identify with reasonable certainty round tools as each is measured, by taking the measured size and comparing it to standard metric, fractional, number and letter sizes.

Since it's mostly smaller drills that don't have legible markings on them, there will some loss of utility due to caliper accuracy and the close overlap of some drill sizes, but overall if you do have a pile of drills it would be a faster way to sort them out and get them back into indexes.

It's nice that the guy's released this, and some will find it helpful. Why be an ass over it?
 
i suppose i'm just an ass, but i didn't catch the purpose of the thing from the op's explanation. i over-
reacted to what sounded like gibberish.

now all i need is some spc devices to read the data.
 
It took me a minute to understand what this is about; why can't you just read the size from your caliper?
For tiny bits, I have gone to the micrometer.

Then I remembered my American youth; all those weird drill bit standards.

When you go metric, there is just one set of numbers, and they're the same ones as your caliper of micrometer provides.

drill bit drawer.jpg
 
There seems to be a few bugs. First only occasionally does the key pad come up on my phone so I can enter data. Do I need to do something?

Second I entered the following and got these results:

0.127 #30 -.002
0.128 #30 -.001
0.129 #30 +.001
0.130 #30 +.002

Didn’t try other entrees because it was such a pain to get the keyboard to come up.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Thanks for trying it out.

For the output, that's actually correct but sorry its hard to read without an explanation.

its saying that closest match to 0.127" is #30 drill (0.1285) and its 0.002 smaller than the nominal drill. and so on for the larger sizes.

if there are multiple matches within +0.001/-0.003 of the nominal drill sizes from the chart it should also give you a list of possible choices with the offset vs. nominal for each choice. if you entered 0.126 you'd get 1/8" (+.001) and #30 (-.003).

I don't know about your phone. I've seen on some phones trouble selecting the text box again after changing the index options. It might work to just hit the green SizeIt button, when the page reloads it will keep your choices and put it back into the entry box, which _should_ reload the keyboard? I only use it with bluetooth calipers on an iphone myself. whenever its not in the text box i just hit the green button to get it back into there.

generally, if you're measuring the bit, you're looking for something smaller because the drill bit is smaller than nominal hole size. I need to adjust how it sorts when there are multiple matches, sometimes it prioritizes ones that are 0.001 over target rather than 0.002 under (which is more likely the real size)

if you'd like some help debugging the phone issue, feel free to PM me with more details and i'll try to figure it out.

There seems to be a few bugs. First only occasionally does the key pad come up on my phone so I can enter data. Do I need to do something?

Second I entered the following and got these results:

0.127 #30 -.002
0.128 #30 -.001
0.129 #30 +.001
0.130 #30 +.002

Didn’t try other entrees because it was such a pain to get the keyboard to come up.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Dude, this is awesome! I've thought about making the same for a while.
It could use a couple of small tweaks but I'm definitely going to bookmark this and leave it open on the toolbox PC
 
Amazing. I suppose it may be something which is good for hobbyists. In a shop I have always seen it as a problem because someone must eval each drill and put it where it is supposed to be stored. I have been tasked with seeing that this neglect is stopped. Put good tools back where they belong so that they can be found and used next go. Talking to is mandatory. :nono:

This is why people have such strong reactions :mad5: to a story like this and it is because they have experienced on occasion when people neglect taking care of their tooling per shop policy.

Too if drills are scattered all over the shop it will effect how perishable tooling is purchased also one might think they need more when they do not. Any shop will bring the problem to the attention of the problem to everyone in the shop. A lot of shops will at the very least place hard control over ordering anything at all. Hard core-well yes that is quite common.

It may be great for hobbie people.
 








 
Back
Top