I love this self-centering, not so expensive doweling jig and it's got holes of different
sizes. But I almost always use it with these holes here so I really wish it
had these sleeves on this side too so I could position four holes accurately
But sometimes I want to drill holes off center or I might want to drill holes in
a face something like this and for cases like that I end up taking The Jig apart
and just clamping one side and I have to put a shim between the one side I keep and that
and now I can use it to drill holes offset from one side of a wide workpiece but for
this application I think it would be easier just to have this bar with four holes in it and I can
just jig the rest of it up with pieces of wood So I brought this chunk of Steel from a local
Scrapper and it's about the right dimensions thickness and widthwise if I cut it off here
and I'll try to do that with an angle grinder I actually adjusted the guard on this and this
spacer here to keep that blade exactly level and so if I just run along this box I should
be able to make that cut fairly accurately Now that it's cooled down a bit I can handle it
better and that cut it feels just silky smooth and you can see the reflection in it quite well too
and it's Square enough for my needs that looks so much better now that I
got the millscale ground off of it got my work piece clamped in here and I've
already verified it it's square enough and I don't have an edge finder so I just have an 8 mm shaft
in here and if I just touch that to the edge here that gives me a reference there and I worked out
the geometry so I know I need to move that from where it is right now 11.8 mm to get in the center
across from here so I got a dial indicator on here and let's just make sure that's zeroed so I need
to bring it out 11.8 mm this way so I'll just count the turns 1 2 3 and 11.8 so I need to be
right about here and I just lock that in by doing up this little screw down here with a wrench
Now for my lateral position the dial indicator won't reach so I'm going to just touch off the
end here and I have to keep the same direction so that's touching now and now I need to move 13.825
mm 4 mm per turn so I just got my finger on where the one was here and I go one two 3 so that's 12
mm plus another mm Plus plus 0.825 and that lines up with the marks I made on here that I scratched
in with a caliper so I'll lock this position here and now I can switch to a short drill in
here and this just happens to be an 8 mm drill so I can keep the same Collet in the Chuck
And I switched to pulley to go for the lowest speed that I can
get so now I can start the first hole here So I'm just using that 8 mm drill bit as a center
drill to basically form that divot cause the next drill is just going to follow that position now I
need to move 19.05 mm over this way and I'll put my finger on here and so that's four turns and 3
mm 1 2 3 and 05 oh I missed one ah hey I screwed up and I lost my reference so I'm just going to
go back to this pin here to get a reference so now I just touched off of here again and
I need to move 32.8 75 mm so that's 8 turns 1 2 7 8 and then 875 mm and that lines up with the
Mark I made so I think that should be good I'll just lock that in real good and I think
I'm ready to place the next hole I'm starting this very gently cause that
drill's got a bit of wobble and if I start it hard it might be off by the wobble
17 turns 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 15 17 and almost 3
mm 1 two three and that seems to be spot on now still in the exact same position I switched
over to a 9.5 mm drill and I added a depth stop here so I won't drill into my table here and I'm
ready to drill through this block, I think. So I keep having to pull down on this handle to
apply pressure here. in the meantime I've got these Springs to counterbalance the weight of
my spindle and everything so I figure if I just release the tension on the Springs
then that'll give me some down-force and I won't have to push so hard
It's just not drilling at all right now. I just realized why sometimes it doesn't cut
if I back out the drill just briefly a chip can get caught in front of the point of the
drill and then the chip spins with the drill so the drill doesn't cut the chip and the chip
doesn't cut the hole and the whole thing acts as a thrust bearing preventing me from pushing
the rest of the drill into the metal After finishing the second hole the work
piece got too hot to touch so I've been cooling it with a fan before I go on.
Too hot touch The hole spacing is not as consistent
as I would like it to be especially this last hole here but let's just try it to see how it does
Well that misalignment still seems to be within reason I can close this joint just fine cause
these dowels are in here rather loose and I have a slight bit of misalignment across
the surface here but I think some of that is these holes actually ended up being a fair bit
bigger than the drill so I have a fair bit of wiggle room and I suspect these holes being a
bit larger might be that I ground that point just a little bit off center so that as the
drill drills it kind of goes wobbling a bit and cuts that hole a little bit too large.
I cut myself another blank and this time I timed how long it took with the angle grinder,
almost 5 minutes. and I lost 3 mm of diameter off of the blade
And I buffed the end a little bit and you can see it is really quite mirror-like.
Got the work piece mounted and in this direction I've already got it
dialed in and this time I'm actually using a proper center drill. I bought that many many
years ago at a yard sale. Hopefully that'll allow me to place the hold more accurately
And now to avoid having to push down so hard I'm going to pre-drill with a 5 mm
drill although that's risky cause that means that bigger drill might grab.
And the deeper I'm drilling the more it sounds kind of crunchy down there
and I think that's just the problem of the chips not clearing adequately and
kind of grinding between the drill and the hole
so with the pilot holes drilled I'm now ready with a bigger drill and this one is actually half
a millimeter smaller than my target hole size because last time the hole just got too big
Well on the plus side is drilling much faster but I'm not sure why it's chattering so much.
that one broke through excellent while checking it over the whole
spacing is more consistent than the last time lateral position is okay
It does seem to decrease as I go this way but I can always add a little bit
of shim on one side to make up for that. What is also more accurate is the hole size
so this is the drill I drilled it with and it fits in there quite snug, not like last
time where the hole is actually quite a bit bigger than the drill. But this is a bit of
a problem because I was actually counting on my hole to be bigger than the drill.
Now as to bring those holes up to size I could use a 3/8-inch drill but that will leave a rough
surface plus it's very likely to grab on the edges of the hole. So I have a 3/8-inch reamer that I
just ordered this is also kind of iffy though because I need to take off 4% of the reamer's
size which is more than they're meant to take oh beautiful that's a really nice smooth
looking hole. Now I realized I
should probably put something under there so that chips can fall out the bottom.
And my 3/8-inch drill fits in there properly snug and smooth. This is becoming like a
properly machined part and adding a slight chamfer around those holes with a larger drill bit.
I'm scribing a few alignment lines that show me where the centers of the dowels
are plus the edges of the outermost dowels the scribing tool I made for this is just a
piece of HSS tool blank which I hammered into a barrel nut and I turned this part down so it
fits inside the collet here and finally drilling some countersink holes for the mounting screws.
So it turns out my joint has got a slight bit of twist to that and so I fixed the
jig and now it doesn't have that. Because somehow the holes on this end
of The Jig ended up closer to this face than on this side and I fixed
that by just grinding away a bit more on this side to bring it back into a level
using a belt grinder built back in 2018 And a smaller mistake that's not possible
to hide is I scribed this line in the wrong place. These are my dowel alignment lines,
and so I rescribed in the right place but I can't erase the old one
So this was my first project on this milling machine-like contraption which is no substitute
for a real milling machine but it allows me to do things that I couldn't do with the drill press