Most shops track big-ticket tooling: inserts, endmills, special form tools. HSS drills usually don't make the list. They're cheap enough individually that nobody wants to spend administrative time on them — and then the shop spends money on premature replacements, broken drills in expensive parts, and reconditioning sent out without any idea what's in the bin.
A drill log doesn't have to be sophisticated. It has to exist. Here's how to build one that actually gets used.
Unnecessary replacements. Without tracking, the default is to replace when something seems dull or when a drill snaps. "Seems dull" is a subjective standard that varies by operator. Some replace at the first sign of roughness. Others run until failure. Neither is optimized.
No resharpening trigger. Reconditioning works best on drills that are dull but not damaged. A drill run until it's visibly chipped or burned often can't be reconditioned to full spec. If you only notice the drill when it's obviously done, you've passed the optimal reconditioning window.
No cost visibility. If you can't say how long a given drill size lasts in a given material, you can't make an informed decision about whether a different grade or coating would pay off.
No pattern recognition. Maybe a specific machine runs through drills faster than others. Maybe one material in your mix chews through tooling at a rate that isn't showing up anywhere. Without a log, these patterns are invisible. Fifteen minutes a month of data entry fixes all of this.
A recipe-card box, a stack of index cards, and a marker. One card per drill — or per drill size group. Write: size and type, date in service, machine assigned, material drilled, tally marks for hole count, dates in/out of resharpening, notes on any chipping or breakage.
The card travels with the drill. Total system cost: a box from a dollar store. Works in shops with no computers at the machines.
Columns that work: Drill ID, Size, Type, Station, Material, Holes (est.), Last Sharpen, Sharpen Count, Status, Notes. Assign each physical drill a simple ID — a label on the shank or a paint marker dot. Update weekly or at end of each job.
Sort by sharpen count to see candidates for web thinning. Sort by last sharpen date to see what's overdue. Filter by material to see what's rough on tooling. Order-of-magnitude awareness is the goal — "roughly 500 holes" beats "no idea."
A composition notebook hung near the drill press. One page per drill or per size, entries written by whoever uses it. The format matters less than the habit. A log nobody fills out is worse than no log — it creates the illusion of tracking without the reality.
If you're sending 20–30 drills per month out for reconditioning, having this data means you're sending them at the right time, with the right specs, and you're catching the ones that need web thinning. The tracking overhead is a few minutes per week. The payback shows up in your tooling budget within a quarter.
Start simple. An index card box is better than nothing. You can always migrate to a spreadsheet when you have data worth organizing.
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