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Hey all,

TL;DR
A tip for drilling magnet holes and pin holes for pinning models together, use split point drills, and check it by eye because some that are advertised as split point aren't.

Story:
I'm magnetising some Adeptus Titanicus Imperial Knights, putting 2mm magnets in the arm joints so weapons can be swapped. The problem is the arms themselves are only a hair thicker than 2mm, so my normal tactic of drilling a 2.4mm oversized hole wasn't going to work. Headed down to the shop, I picked myself up a 2mm drill, got home, and was having a nightmare of a time getting the hole centred and the holes seemed to end up slightly oversized and not very round.

After closely examining the tip of the drill, I realised it wasn't a split point drill, even though it's advertised on the package as split point. I took it back, swapped it for a different brand (that funnily enough wasn't advertised as split point, but close examination revealed that it was).

The person in the store didn't really seem to understand the significance of split point or not split point, so I figured I'd make this thread in case anyone else is having issues getting their holes drilled centred, round, etc. Check your drill tips to see if they're split point.

A regular drill has 2 machined surfaces that form the tip, those 2 curved faces form a ridge that creates the tip of the drill. A split point drill has an additional 2 machined surfaces at a sharper angle, they eat into the ridge so that the drill has a sharp point instead of a ridge. Such drills centre themselves more easily, especially when drilling by hand, and for drilling shallow holes in soft material (like plastic) a good split point drill will create a hole that's more circular and accurate, and if you're careful you don't really need to create a centre mark to guide the drill, it'll drill where you put it even if there's no centre mark.

On very small drills it can be hard to see with my slowly failing eyes, I rotate the drill around and look for light glinting off the additional 2 machined surfaces

Also, buy Australian made instead of Chinese made.

Those you call splitpoint drills a for drilling in wood, maybey you should have asked for wood drills

 skeleton wrote:
Those you call splitpoint drills a for drilling in wood, maybey you should have asked for wood drills

Nah, wood drills are something else again. Split points are typically high speed steel, made for general purpose drilling. This pic below shows a split point on the left, a regular drill on the right...



Source: https://www.atlanticfasteners.com/common-drill-point-styles-compared

And this is a close up from a slightly different angle so you can see the additional machined face I was talking about...



Source: https://www.aimsindustrial.com.au/sutton-drill-d105-1-8-jobber-viper-ansi-b94-11-hss

A wood drill is something different, at least here in Oz if you ask for a wood drill you'll likely get a brad point bit, an auger bit, or a spade bit, like these:

https://www.totaltools.com.au/power-tool-accessories/drill-bits/wood-drilling

Maybe a brad point drill would work well for magnets? Never tried one on anything other than wood.

if you have the material thicness for it, wood drill bits works like a charm provided you hand twist it.

I used them for my 3mm and 5mm mags on my AT titans. My knights i did not bother to mag.

pretty cool skink, thanks!

Thanks for the info, most informative :-)

This was very helpful, thank you.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
if you have the material thicness for it, wood drill bits works like a charm provided you hand twist it.

I used them for my 3mm and 5mm mags on my AT titans.

I'll have to buy some to try, though I don't think I've seen ones as small as would be relevant to most of the drilling work I do on miniatures.

My knights i did not bother to mag.

About half way through I started to ask myself why am I doing this, lol. It's not even for AT, I'm going to use them for Epic and wanted the option to give them 2 CC weapons, but it hardly seems worth the effort!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

usernamesareannoying wrote:pretty cool skink, thanks!

WisdomLS wrote:Thanks for the info, most informative :-)

Gallahad wrote:This was very helpful, thank you.

No worries! Hope it's helpful for some people. If you're buying reasonably high quality drills sold for the purpose of manual drilling I think these days most of them will be split point anyway, but clearly not all of them are and if you're using a regular drill getting it centred and perfectly round will be a lot tougher.