Looking for some advice on how to deal with this issue of hi-hats being way too hot in the drum mix. I am not Mic'ing them directly, only bleed through, but wow they are still way too hot and I'm not sure how to knock them back down.

My overheads are positioned to get away from the hi-hats and that isn't helping. I am using a Sampson drum mic kit, and it actually sounds pretty good for the money. All I can afford anyways. But I'm wondering if the snare mic or even tom mics are just not designed to discriminate directionally and that's creating the issue.

Anyone have this problem before? How did you solve it?

EQ? I split Tom Mic tracks around Tom hits and mute the track when the Tom isn't playing.

As another idea, while I rarely use drum replacer beyond the kick, you might consider this for the snare. That would give you some signal without high hat to mix in.

most of the time,
there is so much hats bleed on the other mics,
that you don't even need them.
 
it's hard without using the right mics, right gain structure, right technique, correct overhead placements, to get the hats separated onto their own track.
 
good mics and technique are key.
 
i've seen folks build 'baffles' to put over the hats to keep them from straightlining it up into the overheads.
 
good drum micing is a real art

Fortunately, hi-hats have a pretty narrow frequency spectrum, allowing you to notch them out with an equalizer without thinning out other instruments. Other, potentially more transparent options include a de-esser, dynamic equalizer, multi-band compressor or a fast compressor with a sidechain filter.

Loud hats are the bane of my existence, when recording hard rock and metal drummers especially. Bleed into the snare is usually the worst of it, but a lot of times the hats overpower the overheads as well. You can't bump the cymbals up without the hats sounding like someone tipping boxes of cutlery over your head because they're so loud.
 
There's a few ways to help this.
 
#1 is your absolute first choice: get the drummer to play the damn hi hats quieter, and the drums louder. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? You'd be surprised. This fixes 99% of the problem right there. After working with pro session players and then going back to n00b drummers who just belt everything because it's "HEAVY METAL, MAN - IT'S GOTTA BE LOUD," it's like night and day...! With a clever use of gates and EQ, you'll have a great mix in no time.
 
#2 - failing that, get some darker sounding hats. What may be fantastic sounding hats live could also be overly bright and loud when you're in the studio. A great example was our previous drummer. He had a SABIAN endorsement and those cymbals sounded magnificent, including the hats, but the moment we got into the studio it was completely unworkable. We borrowed some pretty ordinary and flat sounding Zildjian hats that didn't sound anywhere near as good as our guy's SABIANS but in context, it was a dramatic improvement and sounded great in the actual recording.
 
#3 is micing technique. If you're getting a lot of bleed on your snare especially, make sure you have a mic with great off-axis rejection (a SM57 is a classic example) and point it so the back of it is facing the hats. This won't fix the overheads though, so if you rely on getting an overall kit sound from your overheads rather than just using them to capture the cymbals, you're back to looking at option 1 & 2 there. For what I do, I prefer to close(ish) mic every cymbal so I have a lot more control over everything in the final mix, and I get my actual drum sound from close-micing everything. It's almost a must to do it this way for faster styles of music because the bleed and crosstalk of a more open sounding kit just turns to mush.
 
#4 is when you run out of options, or it's nearly there and you just need to get it the entire way: Make a sample set of each drum in isolation (ie: 3 or so hits on each drum by itself, catching the entire decay, and dumping that into something like Kontakt or another sampler to make a custom sample set of your own kit), and then use Audiosnap to go through an detect each snare hit, and have that trigger a MIDI note in Kontakt of your sample set. Alternatively, use something like SONAR's Drum Replacer or Drumagog to trigger samples (yours or otherwise). I do this fairly often because it gives you a lot of flexibility and it really does get the hats out of the snare mic. I tend to blend the natural snare mic with the sample so it's not ENTIRELY isolated, but it's enough to really get the bleed down to a manageable level. This can easily sound fake, though, so approach with caution.
 
Other thoughts are, as mentioned, baffles. They CAN work but a lot of times the mics that are causing the problem are in a place where you can't get a baffle in front of, and honestly, it doesn't cut down serious problem hats too much. Definitely a useful thing to know, though.
 
Also your recording room is a big part of it. Room too small? Too much reflection? You're gonna have a Bad Time. Aside from potential comb filtering and phase cancellation issues, you're gonna get all kinds of stuff bouncing back at the kit, and the hats are usually the biggest culprit. Even if you dampen the hell out of the room, the sound has still got to go somewhere. You either need to play quieter or find a much bigger room so you're not getting hat wash bouncing around your other mics so much.
 
Take this from a guy who has dealt with (and usually been responsible for) every issue I mentioned above, and I have the grey hairs and mental scars to prove it! HAHA! But yeah, this stuff should point you in the direction to find out what work best for you. 

A lot of ways to address this have been mentioned, but the OP has not mentioned how the hats are recorded. Fixing hot hats in overheads is not the same as fixing hat bleed in drum "close" mics. If the hihat is too loud in the OH mics, the best you might do is ride a volume on the OH tracks, but it won't ever sound natural that way. If the trouble is in the drum mics, and the OHs sound decent solo'd, drum (sample) replacement can save yer a$$..

Sorry fellas, I have not been ignoring ya'll.  I haven't had a chance to test out any of this. 
 
First thing I want to try is playing technique.  I've always hit the hats on the edge for a big ole splash, same when closed.  I'm trying to make a concerted effort to hit the top with the stick tip to get a lighter 'tink' sound.  (Don't ask me what 'tink' sounds like..I think you already know.)  This makes the hi-hat work a bit more crisp too.  
 
I don't know yet how this will sound in the drum mix until I can do some test recordings.    
 
Lord Tim - great, helpful post.  I've decided to also try an SM57 on the snare to see if it filters out more of the hi-hats than my little sampson mic.  Unfortunately, I have a 7 piece kit with 8 mic inputs on my mixer.  So I don't have enough inputs or mics to close mic everything.  But I do think that would be an awesome solution.  Gonna take a bit more time to get to that point, for me.  
 
You also nailed it on the room.  That's my main concern right now with the drum sound as a whole.  It's a reflective room.  Just hanging a blanket over each of the windows has quieted it down some.  It's a concrete floor with a 4 x 6 piece of carpet for the drums to sit on.  I've committed to fully blanketing two and half of the walls to see if I can kill the sound bouncing around this room.  Low budget engineering here.  
 
I can't thank you guys enough for your help.  

Yeah, it sounds like your room definitely is contributing to the issue!
 
When we did our first couple of albums, our drum room was tiny and our drummer hit HARD. The room was really well treated though, but it was still pretty unusable. Not long after, we did a live recording on a pretty big stage in Japan and the difference between our studio stuff and the bleed on the live stuff was night and day - DRAMATICALLY quieter. Definitely made me rethink about where we should be tracking drums after that..!
 
But yeah, in the short term, dampen the living hell out of your room, and see if you can get something on the ceiling too - you'll get a lot of reflections down from that especially. If you can put up some covered RockWool dampening (which is actually quite cheap) or if you have a bit more money, get some baffles from somewhere like http://realtraps.com/ everywhere, including the ceiling, it'll help dramatically.
 
You should be able to get your Sampson mics angled a bit better. I've worked with the same kind of mic kit in a pretty meh room on location and I got OK results. I found the low end a little loose on the mics we had but the directionality was actually not too bad at all. I'd say you'd get similar results to what you'd get with a SM57 so if you don't have access to one, try different positioning next.
 
Good luck! 

Ok, for anyone still interested in this thread...I may have resolved this issue for the most part.  
 
The cure was EQ'ing and room treatment.  Room treatment isn't complete, but three walls are covered with comforter style blankets and that has done wonders with the overall sound, let alone quieting down the cymbals a tad.  I brought down the EQ boost in the 12K range on all of my toms, as well as the overheads, then brought the overheads up a tad more and now the whole kit sounds great.
 
So...looks like I was overcompensating on the higher frequencies and the room was a noise factory.  Still isn't perfect, and there's more to do to finalize the sound but wow, really getting somewhere now.  
 
Thanks all, especially Lord Tim.  Extremely helpful, as always.