January is the busiest month MachinistPost sees all year. Not because shops suddenly discover they need resharpening — it's because shops that did a year-end tool audit figured out in December that they had a bin full of dull HSS sitting around doing nothing. They batched them up, mailed them in, and started the new year with sharp tooling instead of stale inventory.
The shops that skip the audit start January buying new drills they didn't budget for. It's a small thing, but it compounds. If you've never done a structured drill audit at year-end, here's how to run one in an afternoon.
Step 1: Pull Everything Out of the Crib
This sounds obvious, but most tool cribs have two classes of drills: the ones in active rotation and the ones that accumulated in a drawer or box after they went dull. Both need to be inventoried. Pull out all HSS stock — jobbers, screw machine length, long series, reamers if you track them together — and sort by diameter.
Lay them out in rows. What you're looking for immediately: bits with visible tip damage (chipping, heat discoloration running up the flute), bits that are too short to be useful anymore from previous sharpenings, and bits that are clearly sharp and serviceable. Set those categories aside. Everything else — the "probably dull but not obviously dead" pile — is what the audit focuses on.
Step 2: Measure What You Actually Have
For the "probably dull" pile, do a quick point inspection on each bit. You don't need a microscope. You need decent shop lighting and a loupe or a jeweler's loop if you're particular about it. Look at three things:
- Chisel edge width: On a sharp bit it's narrow. On a worn bit it's wide and rounded. Wide chisel edge = needs resharpening.
- Lip symmetry: Hold the bit at eye level, point toward you. Both cutting lips should look the same. If one is higher, shorter, or obviously different, the bit is grinding oversize holes and needs a proper regrind.
- Lip relief: Tilt the bit so you're looking across the relief face behind the cutting edge. There should be a visible angle — clearance that lets the edge bite. If the face behind the edge looks flat, the relief is gone.
Sort into two buckets: resharpenable and retire. Bits with intact flutes, no cracks, and no heat damage up the shank are resharpenable. Bits with cracked flutes, blue heat discoloration on the shank, or bodies that are too short — retire them.
Step 3: Count, Log, and Calculate
Before anything else, log your resharpenable pile by size and count. A simple spreadsheet works fine: diameter, quantity, approximate original purchase price. This becomes your spend-vs.-savings calculation.
Example: if you have 40 dull 1/4" HSS jobbers that cost roughly $8 each when new, you're looking at $320 in tooling that could either go in the trash or get resharpened for around $60–80 at mail-in rates. That's $240–260 in savings — just from that one size.
Run the same math across every size in your resharpenable pile. Most shops doing this for the first time find they have between $400 and $1,200 worth of resharpening value sitting in what they were treating as junk. The audit converts that into actual shop budget you can redirect.
Step 4: Set Par Levels for the New Year
While everything is out of the crib anyway, set minimum stock levels for each drill size you use regularly. Note what sizes you burn through fastest, what sizes you tend to overstock, and whether your current organization makes it easy to grab a sharp bit when you need one.
Shops that track par levels don't run out of the sizes they need in the middle of a job. They also don't over-order sizes they rarely use. That information is only visible when you've actually counted everything, which you're doing right now.
Step 5: Batch and Ship Before the Holiday Slowdown
The practical move is to mail your resharpenable batch in late November or early December, before the holiday crunch hits shipping. Turnaround on mail-in resharpening typically runs 5–7 business days. If you wait until the last week of December, you may not get them back until mid-January.
Early December batches come back by Christmas. You start January with a full crib of sharp tooling, a log of what you have, and par levels set. That's a better starting position than most shops manage.
Why Shops Skip This
The honest answer is time. Auditing a tool crib feels like overhead when there's production to run. But an afternoon in November saves you two or three reactive purchases in Q1, plus the downtime that comes with waiting for tooling to arrive when you've run out mid-job.
The shops that run tight operations — low waste, good margins — tend to treat tool maintenance as a scheduled task, not a reactive one. The annual drill audit is the simplest version of that habit. It takes a few hours once a year and it pays back in real dollars.
A Note on January Backlog
MachinistPost consistently sees the highest order volume in January because shops audit in December. If you want faster turnaround, December shipping beats January shipping every time. The math on when to send is simple: send before everyone else figures out they should.
MachinistPost resharpens HSS drill bits by mail from anywhere in the US. Flat rate per bit, free return shipping on orders of 30 or more, typical turnaround 5–7 business days. Ship your year-end audit batch to us and start January sharp. Learn more at machinistpost.com.