While the price for my 1 1/4", 1/2"-drilled wood ball bead was the best, the majority of the beads were not properly drilled out, which means I had to manually carve out the residual wood to make it fit into my 7/16" rod. While I do have a precision 1/2" drill with a sharp point, it is only good to drill an entire new hole, not to enlarge one that is slightly to small. So I had to manually drive each bead onto my fixated drill, turned with (with gloves on, as the drill is very sharp), until no more grindings were produced, eating a lot of my valuable time. It appears that you either have used a drill that was not sharp anymore, and/or pushed it through very fast. Either way, not properly executed - ate up all the financial savings, and then some, at the expense of my limited life-time.