Here is what I have found about gimlets. If this is not correct, I would enjoy a correction.
Alfred Mordecai's "Artillery for the United States Land Service" (1849) shows two tools. The gunner's gimlet is a wire tool used in the vent hole and made specifically for artillery. Mordecai defines the gunner's gimlet as being made of "No. 8 wire". Pictured below is what I mean by a wire gimlet. This is made according to US specs set out in Mordecai (1849) and Gibbons (1863).
There is another tool in Mordecai called the "fuze gimlet" that is defined as a “common gimlet” of .2 inch diameter. That kind of common gimlet is what is pictured in most eBay auctions. James Gilchrist Benton in "A Course of Instruction in Ordnance and Gunnery" (1862) also defines the "fuze gimlet" as a "common gimlet" used by the artilleryman. The fuze gimlets are not mentioned anywhere in Gibbons (!), but they were used "for boring across the composition instead of sawing off the fuze." In other words, they could be used instead of a fuze saw. There were 3-12 of these common gimlets in each limber.
Now, the clear implication is that the fuze gimlets were just ordinary woodworking tools of a certain size, not made, designed, or issued specifically for artillery. They are defined as "common gimlets" in both Mordecai and Benton, and Gibbons never mentions them as part of the artillery tools. Therefore, there are NO distinguishing characteristics that separate the gimlets used for artillery from those used to make cribbage boards. Unlike the wire gunner's gimlet, which sometimes has arsenal markings, no fuze gimlets that I can find on the Internet have any military markings at all. These woodworking gimlets were not used to clear vent holes - that was the wire gimlet, a completely different tool.
So when we say that a gimlet was used for "clearing the primer debris from the fuse hole," we are confusing the gunner's gimlet, which was long enough to do that, with the fuze gimlet, used for woodboring.
My tentative conclusion is that there is no such thing as an “artillery fuze gimlet”. I cannot find evidence that the military made gimlets specifically for this purpose. There were common gimlets used to bore fuzes, but these were common woodworking tools. Gimlets were used for artillery tasks, just as saws, hammers, nails, and other common implements. The question remains: How do we know that a gimlet was used by an artilleryman?
I conclude that unless we have direct provenance linking a specific common gimlet of .2 inch diameter to an artilleryman, we cannot know if it was used for artillery. It remains to the buyer to decide if digging a common gimlet on a battlefield is enough provenance.
