I may have missed it, but the brad points work their best when there is a piece of harder wood behind the balsa. We removed some 10 windows of planattion shutters from our house over the last three years. The wood is either very straight grain pine or Bass wood. I saves all of the 3 and 4 quarter wood and I have some pieces of it that look like swiss cheese from backiing the drilling of the balsa and lite ply. You don't need to harden the wood first either.

I also use a 1/8" brad point for drilling Robart hinge point sockets.

I picked up a set of Blank and Decker brad point drills, 1/16 through 3/8" from one of their"factory outlet" stores a few years back. I use them only for balsa and they really hold upwell and cut anice smooth hole.

Thebrass tubing drills could be upgraded, using Stainless steel tubingand mounting a pilot drill, maybe 3/32" to center it and keep it going straingt. If you limit your self to a 1/2" depth there would be little that couldn't be handled with that drill for our purposes.

Remember, with soft material like balsa, high speed on the drill with a very fine feed rate will give you your best cut. Most problems with trying to drill anything very thin is that the drill grabs a pulls through the bottom side, riping and tearing the surface. Dull drills and slow RPMs agravate this problem.

There are a number of "step Drills" on the market for drilling thin sheet metal. They may make a good drill for balsa as the twist drill pull though is a problem for sheet metal also. The question would be, what is the step depth. If it is only for say 20 ga metal, it wouldn't be much use for 1/8" balsa. Worth looking into though.

Don

Don