[Zeke]

Depending on your access and angle of attack, one thing you can do is get a hole saw and substitute a longer bit for the pilot bit. With some patience you can get the pilot to start in the angled brace and the hole saw will follow. If the pilot bit wants to keep skipping down the brace, start with a small enough bit or even a nail, punch or some way to make enough of a nick to get a bit to want to stay there.

Seems to me there was a bit with 3 nasty looking points that if started sorta near perpendicular that once the self threading lead got into the wood you could rock it back to as much as 45º and it would do it. Look for Diablo SPEEDemon, but that's not the one I have. They may have taken it off the market because it was unruly and somewhat dangerous if you didn't anticipate all kinds of binding and kickback. Brutal tool.