Sharpening Forstner Bits with a Rotary Tool

If you're using a Forstner Bit on the drill press, and you start getting chips instead of shavings, you have one of two problems. You might be running the bit too fast, it doesn't have time to make the cut so it's just making little chips come out of there, or the bit is dull. Run it too fast, slow your drill press down. Bit is dull, I can help you with that. I can show you how you can sharpen this with the help of a rotary tool right in your own shop.

Here's the way I'm gonna make this happen. I'm gonna anchor my hands down here on my leg, and I've found that by doing that, it allows me to get more consistent results to make sure that I don't mess up the angles that are on this Forstner Bit. What I wanna do is match the angle on this cone shaped grinder, that's a fine grid on there, to the angle that's on the Forstner Bit. I'm gonna spin the Forstner Bit with my left hand while I'm holding the rotary tool stationary with my right hand. Also, I'm gonna do the same thing to this one as I do to this one.

So if I pull three times across on this side, I'll pull three times across on this side. One of the things to notice is that I'm sharpening here on the inside bevel, I'm not messing with the outside of this at all. Just leave that alone. We wanna do all our sharpening here and here. I'm also then gonna work on these flats.

So if I pull three times across this part, I'm gonna stroke three times across this to keep everything nice and consistent. Here's how that's gonna look. Little bit of practice keeping your hands steady manipulating the Forstner Bit, you're gonna get real good at this, you're gonna have your Forstner Bits back and running on the drill press in no time.