Perry, Oklahoma has about 5,000 people. There's a grain elevator, a couple of diners, a hardware store, and a lot of sky. It's the kind of town where most things get fixed rather than replaced, and where "good enough" tends to mean something different than it does in a city. You make things work. You don't throw good tooling in the trash when there's life left in it.
That's the context MachinistPost came out of.
The Gap I Kept Noticing
I'd been watching the resharpening problem for a while. Small shops — the kind running a Bridgeport, a drill press, a lathe, maybe a small CNC — go through HSS drill bits steadily. Not thousands of them, but enough that replacement cost adds up. And for most of those shops, the practical options are: buy new bits, find a local resharpener, or let the dulls accumulate in a bin.
Local resharpening is harder to find than it used to be. There used to be tool service shops in most mid-size cities. A lot of them have closed. The ones that remain often have minimum quantities or lead times that don't work for shops that just need 20 or 30 bits sharpened on a reasonable schedule. And in rural areas — anywhere outside a metro — finding someone who does it right is genuinely difficult.
The mail-in model solves that. USPS flat rate boxes go anywhere in the country for the same price. A shop in rural Kansas or south Georgia has the same access to the service as a shop in Chicago. The geography stops mattering.
The WinsloMatic
MachinistPost runs a Giddings & Lewis WinsloMatic drill grinder. This is the piece of equipment that makes the service worth doing. A WinsloMatic is a machine-shop grade drill grinder — the kind of equipment that production facilities used for decades to maintain their tooling. It grinds both lips simultaneously, controls the relief angle, and produces consistent geometry across every bit that goes through it.
The difference between a machine regrind and a hand regrind is significant. Hand grinding on a bench grinder requires a skilled operator and a lot of practice to produce both lips at the same height, same angle, and same length. Most people who try it make drills that cut oversize holes because the lips are mismatched. The WinsloMatic removes that variable. The geometry is set by the machine, not by feel.
Web thinning is included on every bit we process. As a drill gets shorter from repeated sharpenings, the web — the solid core at the center of the bit — gets thicker in proportion to the diameter. A thick web increases thrust and makes the chisel edge work harder. Thinning it back restores the original cutting behavior. It's a step a lot of resharpeners skip because it takes extra time. We don't skip it.
Why Rural Oklahoma
Honestly, because that's where I am. Perry is home. I'm not here to do the whole "small-town authenticity" marketing thing — the service works or it doesn't regardless of where it's based. But there's something real about being in a place where you understand what it means when a shop is running on tight margins and can't afford to waste money on tooling that doesn't need replacing.
The shops I relate to most are the ones where the owner runs the machines. Where if a bit breaks mid-job, they're the one who has to fix it. Where tool cost is a real line on a real budget. Those shops exist everywhere — in Oklahoma and in Ohio and in Vermont — and they're who MachinistPost is for.
The mail-in model means the physical location doesn't matter much. I ship out of Perry. Orders come in from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington. USPS does the logistics. I do the grinding. It works.
What the Service Actually Is
You box up your dull HSS drill bits. Ship them to MachinistPost — USPS flat rate works fine, standard envelope for small quantities. I regrind them on the WinsloMatic, thin the webs, and ship them back. Flat rate per bit. Free return shipping on orders of 30 or more.
That's the whole thing. No subscription, no contract, no ongoing commitment. You try it once, see what you get back, and decide if it's worth doing again. Most shops that try it keep doing it because the math is hard to argue with — $3–7 per bit resharpened versus $8–15 to buy new, on bits that were nowhere near worn out.
What's Next
The business is still young. The service area is the whole country, but the operation is one person, one grinder, one shop. That puts a real ceiling on volume, and I'm okay with that for now. The goal is to do the work right, not to be the biggest resharpening operation in the country.
If you've got a bin of dull HSS sitting somewhere in your shop right now, that's money waiting to get recovered. Send it in. See what comes back.
MachinistPost is based in Perry, Oklahoma. We resharpen HSS drill bits by mail for shops anywhere in the US. Flat rate per bit, web thinning included, $20 order minimum. Learn more or place an order at machinistpost.com.