As your days of DIY progress and you graduate to hanging doors or installing a wooden floor you'll quickly come to realise the importance of genuine tools, and few tools are more essential than a good set of drill bits and screwdriver heads.

Bosch is a company which has been producing quality woodworking, metalworking and generic DIY equipment for as long as any of us can remember. Bosch tends to produce a good quality piece at a reasonable price, and while this may sound like the dream combination it does come with a caveat. If you plan on doing a large number of projects or work with tougher materials such as dense hardwoods you would be better suited to buying something from the Craftsman or Draper Pro ranges or another of the higher end companies.

This set is a good all round package for the intermediate DIY enthusiast. The box contains 34 individual pieces, a number which is completely unintelligible unless you know what bits make up the list!

5 x wood drill bits 4-8 mm

These bits are you standard wood variety with a locater pin on the top, allowing for less slippage on the work surface. Few DIY projects require you to drill anything larger than 10mm in wood and so up to 8mm is plenty to start with. Quality is of the usual Bosch standard here and all bits have held up to being wiggled around to widen holes and being unceremoniously thrown to the ground in the middle of jobs.

5 x HSS metal drill bits 2-5 mm

Possibly the weakest of the bunch. Drilling metal is a specialist task and these bits are not really suited to anything harder than mild steel or greater than 1mm thick. Chances are however that if you're buying this set you're not drilling big holes in I-Beams!

5 x masonry drill bits 5-8 mm

Okay set, they feel a bit flimsy and I'd fear for them in my large DeWalt drill. They're also not the right shape for my SDS drill so I don't use them. They have stirred paint on occasion and worked out just fine.

3 x socket wrenches 7/8/10 mm
1 x adapter for socket wrench

I wonder about the man who uses these to tighten nuts. You couldn't put much torque through the skinny necks without shearing them off, and why would you be torquing anything with a drill? Buy a ratchet set instead. I guess that they could be useful for flatpack furniture that had a lot of nuts in its construction?

1 x magnetic universal holder

Every man, woman and child should own one of these by law. These little lifesavers pop into your drill chuck at one end and have a hexagonal holder at the other. If you were unaware, nowadays every drill bit accessory comes with a hexagonal end, including the screwdriver bits in this set. This allows you to use parts from other companies with your drill without having to buy another holder. And it's magnetic, allowing you to work from all angles without dropping that tiny screwdriver bit.

1 x countersink bit

I already own a considerably better, albeit more expensive version of this so I've only used it once or twice. It's good enough for day to day use in joinery but keep it away from your furniture projects, it leaves a rather jagged finish which would be a real pain to sand out.

12 screwdriver bits; Philipshead, Pozidrive, Straight and T (3 Sizes each, 4T's)

All except for the "T" set regularly get use around my house and have stood up well to the task so far. As long as you use them with respect and don't jam them into anything and everything you'll be fine. They are made of a good quality metal though and will shear your standard wood screw without so much as a whimper if you press too hard however so take your time with them.

Overall I'm pretty happy with this set, I received it as a gift form the OH for my birthday a while back and have been using it since. I already owned a lot of the equipment from it but it's always nice to have spares and an added bonus is having them all accessible in one location. The storage box is well made and comes in the classic green and red colours of BOSCH. I've dropped the box on my concrete floor more than once and it still closes properly, so I guess you can't get a better, albeit clumsy, recommendation than that!

£10.99 on Amazon at the minute; a bargain!