A two-stage strategy has been used to design an optimum multifacet drill (MFD) for crankshaft drilling. In the first stage, a heuristic MFD was developed by adding an additional facet to the outer corner of the conventional split-point drill. Under accelerated life test conditions, this new drill can decrease thrust force by 21.0% and increase drill life by 50% compared to a split-point drill. In the second stage, compre-hensive force models for predicting thrust and torque were modified and developed. Using the force mod-els, point optimization was carried out to design the optimum MFD. This new MFD can further decrease the thrust by 21.3 % over the heuristic MFD, and accelerated life tests haveshowna25% further increase in drill life.