Daniel's still unpacking, and the decluttering has reached the drill bit drawer. He rounded up his wife's collection, kept a few, gave a few away, and then tried to buy a handful of Bosch bits with a known spec sheet. That's where the trouble started. He wanted one bit, or maybe a few, that could handle light concrete, drywall, and the acrylic bins he's been drilling constantly for organizing. Seems reasonable. A bit that can chew through concrete should walk through plastic, right? Then he noticed Bosch rates bits by material, and the double take hit. He also stumbled on a listing for a drill bit sharpener and had a second double take. Do people actually sharpen drill bits? And what can't be drilled at all, even with the right tool?
The sharpener one is the tell. We sharpen knives without thinking. A dull knife is obvious. A dull drill bit just makes you lean on the drill, which heats the bit and kills it faster. Most people never notice the bit went dull. They just think drilling is supposed to be slow and smoky.
So today we're getting into the surprisingly deep world of drill bit metallurgy, geometry, and maintenance.
Let's start with the thing Daniel's instinct got wrong, because it's the thing almost everyone gets wrong. A drill bit isn't a generic piece of hard metal with a spiral cut in it. It's a cutting tool with a specific geometry matched to how a material fails. Concrete fails by fracturing. Wood fails by shearing along fibers. Plastic stretches and tears. Metal cuts. Those are four different failure modes, and they need four different cutting edges.
So the mental model is closer to a kitchen than a hardware store. You wouldn't use a cleaver for tomatoes.
Right. And the cleaver isn't weaker than the tomato knife. It's shaped wrong. A masonry bit is extremely hard, but it's shaped to smash, not to slice. The carbide tip is blunt compared to a steel cutting edge, and it's designed to work with a hammering action. The drill pounds it into the concrete, the tip fractures the material, and the flutes just clear the dust out. It's a tiny jackhammer, not a knife.
Which is exactly why it makes a mess of plastic. Plastic doesn't fracture. It's ductile and gummy. You need a sharp edge with a high rake angle that peels a clean chip off. A masonry bit tears the plastic instead of cutting it, and the friction melts the hole closed behind the bit.
HDPE is the worst case. It's soft enough to grab, tough enough to resist tearing cleanly, and it melts at a low temperature. A concrete bit going into HDPE is like trying to slice a warm gummy bear with a spoon. You'll get through, but the hole will be rough, oversized, and have a melted rim. If it's an acrylic bin, you might crack it outright.
Daniel asked whether Bosch makes a plastic-specific bit. The honest answer is that for plastics, the standard advice is a sharp high speed steel bit, low speed, light pressure, and a backing board so the exit doesn't blow out. There are bits marketed for acrylic, but they're mostly just HSS bits with a sharper point and a steeper rake angle.
Bosch does have their Multi Construction line, which claims to handle masonry, tile, and wood. And they'll do it, sort of. They're a compromise. The geometry is a middle ground, and a middle ground is exactly what it sounds like. They won't drill concrete as fast as a proper masonry bit, and they won't leave as clean a hole in wood as a proper wood bit. For plastic, they're still not the right tool. The Multi Construction bit is for people who want to drill a hole in a wall and aren't sure if it's brick or drywall behind the paint. It's not a universal bit, because a universal bit doesn't exist.
Let's map the actual landscape. What are the families?
The workhorse is the twist drill bit, usually high speed steel. That's your general purpose metal and plastic bit. HSS is a steel alloy that keeps its hardness at high temperatures, which matters because cutting generates heat. Then you've got cobalt bits, which are HSS with cobalt added. They keep their hardness at even higher temperatures, so they're for stainless steel and other tough alloys. Titanium coated bits are HSS with a hard coating. The coating reduces friction and helps the bit stay sharp, but once the coating wears off, you're left with the same HSS underneath. It's not a different bit, it's a dressed-up one.
The titanium coating is the marketing one. People think they're buying a titanium bit.
They're buying a bit that was briefly titanium flavored. The coating is microns thick. It helps, but it's not a carbide bit. Carbide is a different animal. Solid carbide is used for very hard materials, and carbide tipped bits are used for masonry. The tip is brazed onto a steel body. The steel body absorbs the shock, and the carbide does the cutting, or in the case of masonry, the fracturing.
And the point angle. You mentioned a hundred eighteen degrees versus a hundred thirty five.
The point angle is the angle at the tip. A hundred eighteen degrees is the classic general purpose angle. It works for wood, plastic, and mild steel. A hundred thirty five degree point is flatter and self-centering, which helps on harder metals because it doesn't walk as much when you start the hole. But the flatter angle also means the cutting edge is shorter, so it doesn't cut soft materials as aggressively. It's a tradeoff. And then there's the flute design. Flutes are the spiral grooves that carry chips out of the hole. In wood, you want deep, fast flutes to clear sawdust. In metal, the chips are smaller and the speeds are slower, so the flute design is different. A wood bit in metal will clog and overheat. A metal bit in wood will cut, but slowly.
And then the specialty bits. Glass and tile.
Spear point carbide. It looks like a little arrowhead. You don't cut glass with a twist bit, you grind it with the carbide point, and you do it slowly with water for cooling. And hole saws for big diameters. A hole saw is a ring of teeth around a pilot bit. It only cuts the perimeter, so it's much faster than trying to turn a two inch hole into sawdust.
Which brings us back to Daniel's actual problem. He's drilling acrylic bins. What does he actually reach for?
A sharp HSS bit, standard hundred eighteen degree point, low speed, and a piece of scrap wood behind the plastic. The backing board is the part people skip. It supports the plastic so the bit doesn't punch through and crack the far side. If he's drilling a lot of acrylic, a step bit is worth considering. Step bits cut clean, round holes in thin material without grabbing. They're more expensive, but they're the right tool for sheet plastic.
And if he insists on using the concrete bit for everything?
He'll get holes. They'll be ugly, maybe cracked, maybe melted, and the bit will wander because the blunt tip doesn't center well in plastic. He'll get through, but he'll hate every one of those holes. The bin won't care. The bin just wants to hang on the wall.
The bin is not a demanding client.
The bin is the most forgiving client in the world. It will accept a terrible hole. That's the trap. The material doesn't complain, so people never learn they're doing it wrong.
So if bits are this specialized, what about keeping them sharp? Daniel saw a drill bit sharpener and did a double take. Do people actually use these?
They do, and it's a real product category. The most famous one is the Drill Doctor. They've been around for decades. The idea is that instead of throwing away a dull bit, you grind a new cutting edge on it. The machine holds the bit at the correct angle and spins it against a grinding wheel. You can set it for a hundred eighteen or a hundred thirty five degree point, and some models do split points, which is a little notch at the tip that reduces the pressure needed to start the hole.
And the economics?
For cheap HSS bits, it's barely worth it. A ten pack of small bits costs less than a decent sharpener. But if you're buying cobalt bits or large diameter bits, a single bit can cost fifteen, twenty, thirty dollars. Sharpening that bit five times instead of throwing it away pays for the machine. And a sharpened bit cuts faster, cleaner, and cooler. It's not just about saving money. It's about the bit working better while it's sharp.
So the sharpener is like the knife sharpener. The people who buy them are the people who already bought good knives.
Nobody sharpens a disposable knife. The sharpener is the admission that the tool is worth maintaining. And here's the cultural gap Daniel noticed. We treat drill bits as consumables because they're cheap and ubiquitous. A ten dollar bit seems disposable. But the same logic applies to a ten dollar kitchen knife, and nobody throws those away. The difference is visibility. A dull knife is immediately obvious. You feel it. A dull drill bit just makes you push harder, and pushing harder creates more heat, and the heat destroys the temper in the steel, and the bit gets duller faster. It's a feedback loop that ends with a smoking bit and a hole that took five minutes instead of thirty seconds.
And once the temper is gone, the bit is not coming back. Sharpening won't fix overheated steel.
Right. If the bit turned blue from heat, the hardness is gone at the cutting edge. You can grind a new edge, but it won't hold. That's the thing about drill bit maintenance. It's not just sharpening. It's speed, pressure, and cooling. Cutting oil on metal, water on glass, slow speed on plastic. The sharpener is the last step, not the first.
So what should someone look for in a sharpener, assuming they've decided to become a person who sharpens drill bits?
Angle adjustment is the big one. You need to match the point angle the bit was ground at. If you sharpen a hundred thirty five degree bit at a hundred eighteen degree setting, you've changed the bit's geometry and it won't cut the same. Most sharpeners do both. The second thing is the grinding wheel. Cheap sharpeners use aluminum oxide wheels that wear down and need replacing. Better ones use diamond wheels, which last much longer and cut carbide. If you want to sharpen masonry bits, you need a diamond wheel, because carbide is too hard for aluminum oxide. And honestly, most people don't sharpen masonry bits. The carbide tip is small, and once it's gone, the bit is done. You can't grind a new carbide tip onto a steel body at home.
So the masonry bit is the truly disposable one.
Masonry bits are consumable in a way that HSS bits aren't. The carbide tip wears down, and when it's smooth, the bit stops fracturing concrete and starts polishing it. You throw it away. That's the end of that bit's life. But a good HSS or cobalt bit can be resharpened many times before it's too short to use.
Which raises the question Daniel ended on. What can't be drilled at all?
Some things, even with the right bit, are effectively undrillable with a handheld drill. The classic case is hardened steel. Spring steel, certain tool steels, bearing steel. These are alloys that have been heat treated to be very hard, and some of them are work hardening, which means the act of drilling makes them harder. The bit cuts for a second, then the material hardens at the cutting point, and the bit just spins and heats up. You can destroy a brand new cobalt bit in thirty seconds on the wrong piece of steel.
Work hardening is the nasty one. The material punishes you for trying.
It's a feedback loop in the wrong direction. The more you drill, the harder it gets, and the harder it gets, the faster your bit dulls. Machining forums are full of threads about this. Someone tries to drill a hole in a leaf spring or a bearing race and goes through five bits before they realize the material is winning. The answer is usually carbide, but even carbide has limits. Carbide is extremely hard but brittle. In a handheld drill, with the vibration and the wobble, a carbide bit can chip or shatter. It's designed for rigid setups like a milling machine or a drill press, where there's no wobble and the feed rate is controlled.
So the handheld drill itself becomes the limiting factor.
At some point, yes. The material is drillable in principle, but not with the tool you own. For truly hard materials, the options are annealing the steel first, which means heating it to soften it, and that ruins whatever heat treatment the part needed. Or you use a different process entirely, like electrical discharge machining or laser cutting. Those aren't things you do with a drill. They're things you send to a shop.
So the honest answer to what can't be drilled is, it depends on what you're willing to call drilling. A carbide bit in a milling machine can cut hardened steel. A carbide bit in a cordless drill on a wobbly workbench is a gamble.
And the gamble is usually a shattered bit and a ruined workpiece. The sawmill creek thread Daniel's question touches on, a guy trying to drill a specific steel part, that's the cautionary tale. He wasn't using the wrong bit. He was using the wrong process. The material was work hardening, and every attempt made it worse. The answer wasn't a better bit. The answer was to stop drilling.
So the rule is, if the bit smokes and the hole doesn't deepen, stop. The material is telling you something.
The material is telling you it's harder than your bit, and it's getting harder while you watch. That's the moment to switch to a different approach. Anneal it, EDM it, or accept that this particular hole is not happening today.
You mentioned EDM. Electrical discharge machining. That's the one where you erode the metal with sparks.
Right. It doesn't cut mechanically at all. It uses electrical discharges to vaporize tiny amounts of metal. It'll cut anything conductive, regardless of hardness. But it's a machine shop process. You're not doing it with a cordless drill. The point is that hardness isn't the only variable. Some materials are abrasive, like fiberglass, which dulls bits almost instantly. Some are gummy, like aluminum, which clogs flutes. Some are brittle, like cast iron, which chips. Matching the bit to the material means understanding how the material fails, not just how hard it is.
That's the mental model Daniel was missing. He was thinking in terms of strength. A strong bit should beat a weak material. But it's not a contest of strength. It's a matching problem. You need the right geometry for the failure pattern.
And the right speed, and the right pressure, and the right cooling. The bit is one part of a system. The drill, the speed setting, the feed pressure, the lubricant, the backing board. All of it matters. A great bit at the wrong speed will still smoke and dull.
So the Bosch spec sheet is actually doing Daniel a favor. When it says a bit is rated for masonry, it's not saying the bit can't touch anything else. It's saying the bit is optimized for masonry, and using it on other materials will produce worse results and shorter life.
Bosch is precise because they sell to professionals who need to know exactly what they're buying. A professional drilling fifty holes a day in concrete needs a bit that does that one thing well. A homeowner drilling one hole in a wall needs a bit that does five things adequately. The marketing problem is that homeowners buy the professional bit because it seems stronger, and then they use it wrong and wonder why their holes look terrible.
The Multi Construction bit is Bosch's answer to that homeowner. It's the compromise bit.
It's the bit for people who don't want to think about bits. And there's a place for that. If you're hanging a shelf and you don't know if you're drilling into brick or drywall, the Multi Construction bit will get you through either one. It won't be the best at either, but it'll work. The problem is when people assume that compromise extends to plastic. It doesn't. Plastic is the material that exposes every compromise in geometry.
Because plastic is the most honest material. It doesn't fracture like concrete, doesn't chip like tile, doesn't cut like wood. It just tears and melts.
And it grabs. The worst thing a drill bit can do in plastic is grab and pull itself in. That's how you crack an acrylic bin. A sharp bit with a high rake angle at low speed is the only way to get a clean hole. The bit should be peeling a continuous chip, not grinding dust.
So if Daniel wants a set that covers his actual life, what's the list?
A set of sharp HSS bits for plastic and wood, a few masonry bits for the concrete walls in his apartment, and maybe one Multi Construction bit for the mystery walls. That's it. He doesn't need a universal bit, because it doesn't exist. He needs three small sets, and he needs to know which one to reach for.
And the acrylic bins need the HSS bit, low speed, backing board.
Every time. The concrete bit will get through the bin, but it'll leave a hole that looks like a rat chewed it. The bin will still hang. The bin won't complain. But Daniel will know.
The bin will know too. The bin will always know.
The bin is silently judging him.
So let's talk about the sharpener question more directly. Daniel saw a listing and did a double take. Is this a real thing people buy, or is it a gadget for the tool obsessed?
It's both. It's a real product category with a legitimate use case, and it's also a gadget for the tool obsessed. The Drill Doctor has been around since the nineties, and it's the default answer. The current models handle bits from about three thirty-seconds up to three quarters of an inch, and they do both common point angles. The reviews are generally positive, with the caveat that there's a learning curve. The first few bits you sharpen won't be as good as factory, but after you get the hang of it, they're close.
So it's like learning to sharpen a knife on a stone. The first few attempts are worse than the dull knife.
And some people never get past that and go back to buying new bits. That's a legitimate choice. If you're only using small HSS bits, the sharpener doesn't pay for itself. But if you're buying cobalt bits for stainless steel, or large bits for woodworking, the sharpener is a no brainer. A single good forstner bit can cost forty dollars. Sharpening that five times saves you two hundred dollars.
Forstner bits. Those are the flat bottomed wood bits.
Right. They cut clean, flat bottomed holes in wood, and they're expensive. And they dull, because wood is abrasive. Sharpening a forstner bit by hand is a skill. A machine that does it consistently is worth real money.
So the sharpener is a tool for people who use expensive bits. The person with a ten pack of cheap HSS bits from the hardware store is not the target market.
The person with the ten pack of cheap bits throws them away when they dull. And that's fine. That's the disposable model. The problem is when people apply the disposable model to expensive bits. That's the category error. It's like buying a good chef's knife and throwing it away when it dulls because you've never used a honing steel.
The honing steel is the thing people buy when they realize the knife is worth keeping.
And the drill bit sharpener is the same moment for drill bits. It's the moment you realize the bit is a tool, not a supply.
Which brings us to the cultural question. Why do we treat drill bits as disposable when we'd never treat a knife that way?
I think it's because drill bits are hidden. A knife is in your hand, you see the edge, you feel it drag. A drill bit is in a chuck, spinning, and you can't see the cutting edge while it's working. The failure is invisible. You just push harder, and the drill gets hot, and eventually the bit smokes. By then, the bit is ruined. The knife gives you feedback every time you use it. The drill bit only gives you feedback when it's already too late.
And the knife is personal. It's in the kitchen, it's part of cooking, it has a handle that fits your hand. A drill bit is a little metal stick in a case. Nobody has a favorite drill bit.
Some people do. The woodworkers do. They have a favorite forstner bit, a favorite brad point bit. They know which one cuts clean and which one wanders. But the average homeowner doesn't. The average homeowner has a drill, and a bag of bits that came with it, and no idea what any of them are for.
The bag of bits that came with the drill is the worst offender. It's a random assortment of cheap bits, and they're all dull, and the homeowner uses the first one that looks roughly the right size. That's not a tool kit, that's a landfill starter pack.
The drill manufacturer includes the bits because the drill looks incomplete without them. But they're not good bits. They're the drill bit equivalent of the plastic knife that comes with a takeout order. Functional, barely, and not meant to last.
So Daniel's instinct to buy a few known Bosch bits is the right one. He's replacing the mystery bag with a known quantity.
He's doing the thing we talked about with the drill itself. He's buying a spec sheet, not just a tool. The Bosch bit has a material rating, a point angle, a coating. He knows what it is. That's worth something, even if he never sharpens it.
The spec sheet is the difference between a tool and a mystery.
The mystery is what he found in his wife's collection. A wide ranging collection of drill bits, none of which she knew anything about. That's the default state of most households. Drill bits accumulate like pens. Nobody buys them, they just appear.
They breed in the drawer. That's the real answer to where they came from.
Drill bits are like coat hangers. They multiply in the dark. Nobody has ever bought a coat hanger, and yet every closet is full of them.
Let's get back to the undrillable question, because I want to make sure we answer it properly. What's the actual list?
Hardened steel is the big one. Spring steel, bearing steel, high speed steel itself. If it's been heat treated to be hard, a conventional bit won't cut it. You need carbide or diamond, and even then, a handheld drill is risky. Then there's glass and tile, which aren't undrillable but need a specific bit and technique. Then there's abrasives, like fiberglass and carbon fiber, which will drill but dull bits almost immediately. And then there's the work hardening alloys, which are the nastiest because they punish you for trying.
Carbon fiber. That's the one that's going to matter more as materials get more exotic.
Carbon fiber is abrasive and it delaminates. The bit cuts through the fibers, but the fibers dull the bit, and the exit side of the hole splinters. You need very sharp bits, sacrificial backing, and you accept that the bit is going to die young. It's not undrillable, but it's expensive to drill.
The work hardening alloys. What's the actual mechanism?
When you cut the metal, you deform the crystal structure at the cutting point. In some alloys, that deformation makes the metal harder. The bit cuts a little, the metal hardens, the bit can't cut anymore, and it just rubs. The rubbing creates heat, which hardens the metal more. It's a spiral. The only way to win is to cut before the hardening happens, which means very sharp carbide, very high speed, very rigid setup. Or you stop and change processes.
The sawmill creek guy who destroyed multiple bits wasn't doing anything wrong. He was just using the wrong process for the material.
He was doing what any reasonable person would do. He had a steel part, he needed a hole, he reached for a drill. The material had other plans. That's the thing about undrillable materials. They don't look different. A piece of spring steel looks like any other steel. You don't know it's going to eat your bits until you try.
By then, you've already ruined the bit and possibly the part.
The part is the expensive thing. A bit is ten dollars. A bearing race or a spring that you've now overheated and work hardened is the real loss. The bit is the cheap casualty.
The practical takeaway is, know what you're drilling before you drill it. If it's a mystery piece of steel, test it with a file first. If the file skates off it, it's harder than the file, and a drill bit won't touch it.
The file test is the old machinist trick. A file is about sixty Rockwell hardness. If the file won't cut it, the material is harder than sixty, and no HSS bit will cut it either. That's the moment to stop and reconsider.
That's a good rule. The file is the canary in the coal mine.
The file is the cheapest diagnostic tool in the shop. It costs five dollars and it'll tell you in two seconds whether you're about to ruin a bit.
To answer Daniel's original question directly. Is there a bit that handles concrete, drywall, and plastic? No. There are bits that handle each of those well, and there are compromise bits that handle them all poorly. The right move is a small set of each.
For the acrylic bins specifically, the HSS bit at low speed with a backing board. That's the answer. Not the concrete bit, not the Multi Construction bit. The sharp HSS bit he probably already has.
For the sharpener, it's a real product, it's worth it if you buy good bits, and it's the moment you stop treating drill bits as disposable.
The Drill Doctor is the default, but there are others. The key specs are angle adjustment and a diamond wheel if you want to do carbide. For most people, a basic model that does HSS bits is enough.
For the undrillable question, the answer is hardened steel, work hardening alloys, and anything that requires a process other than drilling. The file test tells you before you ruin a bit.
The file test and the smoke test. If the bit is smoking and the hole isn't deepening, stop. You're not drilling, you're polishing.
Hilbert: You're off on the scale, though.
Off on the scale?
Hilbert: How common the sharpening is. You made it sound like a niche thing for woodworkers with expensive bits. I worked a summer in a machine shop, late two thousands, and the old man who ran it sharpened everything. He had a coffee can full of dull bits, and every Friday afternoon he'd sit at the bench grinder and work through the can. By hand. No jig, no Drill Doctor. Just him and the wheel and forty years of knowing the angle.
Hand sharpening is a real skill. Most people can't do it well.
Hilbert: He could. He'd hold the bit up to the light, give it a little twist, touch it to the wheel for two seconds, dip it in water, hold it up again. Took him maybe a minute a bit. And the result was better than factory. The man understood the geometry in his hands. He didn't need a machine to set the angle because his wrists remembered it.
That's a dying skill.
Hilbert: It's dead. The machines killed it. Now you clamp the bit in the plastic guide and turn the crank and it comes out fine. Not great. Fine. The old man would have thrown a Drill Doctor across the room. He'd say it takes the thinking out of it, and the thinking is the whole job.
The thinking is the whole job. That's the thing about hand sharpening. You're not just grinding an edge, you're reading the bit. The wear pattern tells you what speed you were running, whether you were feeding too hard, whether the material was grabbing.
Hilbert: He'd read the bit like a doctor reads a chart. Tell you exactly what you did wrong by looking at the wear. Then he'd fix it and hand it back and say don't do that again.
Did he have a rule about what not to drill?
Hilbert: He wouldn't touch anything harder than mild steel. If you brought him a piece of spring steel and asked for a hole, he'd tell you to take it somewhere else. His line was, if it's that hard, you don't need a hole in it. He meant it. He thought drilling hardened steel was a fool's errand, and he wasn't going to waste his bits on your stubbornness.
That's a defensible position.
Hilbert: I've still got the coffee can. Full of dull bits. Never sharpened one of them myself. I just buy new ones. So I sat there every Friday watching him work, and I learned exactly how it's done, and I've never done it. Not once.
You absorbed the skill by proximity and then refused to use it.
Hilbert: I absorbed the lecture and ignored the practice. The can's in the garage. Every time I buy new bits, I think about it. Then I put the new bits in the drill case and close the drawer.
That's the disposable model with extra steps. You have the knowledge, you have the tool, you have the dull bits, and you still buy new ones.
Hilbert: The knowledge is the problem. I know how long it takes. A minute a bit, he did it. I'd spend an hour on the first one and it'd come out worse. So I buy new bits and tell myself I'm busy.
The old man would have something to say about that.
Hilbert: He'd say I was raised by wolves. Then he'd take the can and do it himself and hand it back and tell me to try harder next time.
But he's not around to do it now, so the can just sits there.
Hilbert: The can sits there. The new bits are in the drill case. The system works.
The system works until you run out of new bits to buy.
Hilbert: The hardware store's not going anywhere.
That's the real answer to why we treat drill bits as disposable. It's not that we don't know better. It's that buying new ones is easier than doing the maintenance, and the maintenance is a skill we never learned.
The skill is dying because the machines replaced it, and the machines are fine, but they're not the same.
Hilbert: The machines are fine. That's the whole problem. They're fine, and fine is good enough, and good enough means nobody learns the old way. The old man took the skill with him. I watched him do it for a whole summer and I still can't do it. That's what dying means.
The sharpener Daniel saw is the compromise. It's the machine that lets you keep the bit without learning the skill. It's not as good as the old man, but it's better than the trash can.
Hilbert: It's better than the trash can. I'll give it that. But the old man would have thrown it across the room.
The old man would have thrown a lot of things across the room.
Hilbert: He threw a cordless drill across the room once. Said it was a toy. Went back to his corded Milwaukee and never looked at it again.
The corded versus cordless debate is a whole other episode.
Hilbert: It's not a debate. The old man won it. The cordless drill is in the corner of the shop with a broken chuck and a layer of dust. The corded Milwaukee is still there, still works, still drills straight. He's been dead eight years and the drill's still better than anything I own.
That's either a testament to the tool or an indictment of everything made since.
Hilbert: Both. Probably both.
The open question is whether the disposable mindset is a symptom of a bigger shift. We've stopped maintaining things because the things got cheaper and the skills got rarer, and now the skills are gone and the cheap things are all we have.
As materials get more exotic, the gap between what a homeowner can drill and what a professional can drill gets wider. Carbon fiber, hardened alloys, work hardening steels. The average person with a cordless drill and a bag of mystery bits is not equipped for any of it.
The average person is equipped for drywall and softwood and the occasional plastic bin. That's the honest scope of the home drill. Everything else is either a specialty tool or a machine shop job.
Next time you reach for a drill bit, ask what it's actually made for. And whether you're willing to sharpen it, or just throw it away. The answer says more about you than the bit.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing, as always.
This has been My Weird Prompts, the human AI collaboration podcast. If you enjoyed it, leave a review wherever you listen, or email us at show at my weird prompts dot com. We'll be back soon.
