I bought from these grinding companies.

http://www.cencogrinding.com/drillblanks.html

This place has high quality center ground drill blanks.
It comes annealed so it can be ground into real HSS drills.
Quote:

"From start to finish 100% American made.

We specialize in high speed steel drill blanks of all sizes from .005"
to 3.500" in diameter with a .0002 tolerance and lengths up to 60".

M-2 has a rockwell of 62-64.

M-42 has a rockwell of 65-67.

Drill Blanks are also known as core pins, punches, dowels, reamers,
gages, mandrels, pinions, and guide pins.

All of the above can be produced from a variety of materials and
hardnesses. "

This is where they sell them :

http://www.drillblanks.com/

And have a more updated web. The high quality Labrobe (or such
spelling) got theirs here - and may still do.
http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Latrob.../dp/B000LDIR5Q


Martin

On 3/11/2015 11:22 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
On 12 Mar 2015 03:24:35 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

On 2015-03-11, Ed Huntress wrote:
On 11 Mar 2015 02:25:28 GMT, "DoN. Nichols"
wrote:

On 2015-03-10, dpb wrote:
On 03/10/2015 9:04 AM, Ivan Vegvary wrote:

snip


Well, as suggested, there's always the drill stem in virtually any
diameter you want/need to fabricate some

Beware! (Modern drill shanks are not hardened -- they are mild
steel. The flutes and tip are HSS and there is a pretty much invisible
weld between the flutes and the shank.

To test this -- take a file to the shank first, then try the
flutes. You will see the difference rather quickly. :-)

I have not heard of this. Maybe it's something the Chinese are doing.

Standard American jobber bits (like Cleveland) are made of a solid
piece of high-speed steel. The shank is annealed to prevent dangerous
breaks. Shanks on some brands of jobber bits are around 0.002" under
the nominal diameter, and generally are not precision-ground.

Are you sure you aren't looking at the end of a coating, rather than a
weld? There are several different coatings in use on quality drill
bits.

I don't *see* the weld (I said "pretty much invisible"), but the
shanks of normal HSS drill bits made in the USA are *way* too soft to be
annealed HSS.

Annealed M2 is around 220 - 240 Brinell. That's just convertible to
Rockwell C, value of 20.

That's pretty soft steel, Don. Hot-rolled 1018 or 1020 is somewhere in
the neighborhood of 130 Brinell. But cold-rolled is quite a bit
harder.

I don't *use* drills from China. I'm just judging by how
soft the shanks are. Whenever you spin a bit in a chuck, you will see
ridges and grooves dragged around the shank.

Sure. I have more than a few that are decorated like that. g And you
can bend the shanks in a vise.


If HSS can really be annealed *that* soft, I'll take your word
for it, but I thought that even annealed HSS was not nearly that soft.

We seldom see real annealed HSS, because it takes a long temperature
ramp-down from 1600 F to anneal it all the way. Like 24 hours or so. I
don't know how close you can get with a quick heat-and-cool cycle;
maybe it's not far off of the full-anneal value.

It's normally only sold in the annealed condition to the cutting tool
manufacturers. I don't know how the twist drill companies do it after
hardening the drill bits, nor just how soft they're able to get it.

But I do know, from my days as tooling editor at Machining Magazine,
that those shanks are annealed, and that the steel is all in one
piece, all of the same material. Or it was. They typically grind the
shanks in a centerless grinder, and they're fed into a fixture, since
they can't be through-fed. That limits the accuracy of the grinding.

I haven't been involved with these questions for 15 years, so, as with
most things, I may be out of date. d8-)