Tuesday, July 07, 2026
The drill bit sharpener that led to the legacy of William Sellers
www.thefabricator.com: One Friday a few months ago, when Jim Howe, my boss at Howe’s Welding and Metal Fabrication, asked me to drill 2 ¼-in. holes in some 1 ½ -in. plate (see Figure 1), I knew the task would be slow, requiring multiple bits and a lot of patience. I didn’t know, however, that I was about to fall down a drill-bit-sharpening rabbit hole.
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It's interesting to learn the story behind some of the standardized hardware that we work with every day. Often I find myself only taking particular notice of a standard when there are multiple to choose from. For example I've never found myself looking at a screw and wondering who chose a thread angle of 60 degrees but I do notice the pros and cons of Phillips and Robertson heads. I mostly attribute this to the existence of multiple standards making you conscious of the specifics of a standard because you need to actively make a choice which standard to use. But it feels more natural for something to fade into the background when there's no choice to be made. For me the threads of a screw seemed so ubiquitous that I never thought to question how we chose the standard in the first place. It seems that while standards may be ubiquitous in the modern day they were an impassioned subject of debate in the not so distant past.
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