Without a drill press, drilling a truly straight hole is difficult, and when it's
important or you have limited resources, trial and error cannot be an option.
This is how I drill a straight hole without a drill press.
It seems pretty simple, to hold the drill 90 degrees to a surface,
even when I hold a drill, what feels like
90 degrees is often not, but there's an easy way around this. I don't need to
worry about premanufactured jigs, I don't need a drill press and I don't
even need to be particularly skilled with the drill, but I do need to make a jig.
A jig is just something that holds tooling in place.
So, I'm going to need a few things.
Firstly, I need a piece of thin timber sheet, this piece of scrap
timber sheet is 3mm and that's about as thick as I would go,
anything larger will not work. I need one straight edge on the sheet. If I didn't
have a straight edge, I'd need to make one.
I need a nice sharp pencil, a rule,
a square, some superglue, a clamp, a sharp blade, and of course a drill and some bits.
Okay, let's make it!
I want to make 12 divisions of 15mm across
the sheet, that's 13 lines, which means the sheet needs to be at least 180mm
wide, and with the square, I make the lines.
I need another line along the sheet 15mm parallel to the straight
edge and another a perhaps 50mm, I mark the edge with the
continuation of every second line. Now, I want the hole in my finished material to
be 5mm, so I'm first going to drill a smaller guide hole on each of
the intersects where the lines continued over the edge,
then I drill with the 5mm bit.
Now, I have to cut this up, with the sharp blade and a rule or a
straight edge, a metal one is best, being very careful of my fingers,
I cut the longest lines first, I run the blade along the straight edge in shallow
cuts until I am through the board.
Once done, the blade has kicked up the edge a bit, so I'm going to sand it down
so it's flat across the piece. Now I have all the pieces ready for my jig.
I put the drill bit through the holes to line them up, I clamped them gently for a
little more friction between the pieces, and I check the drill bit is
90 degrees to one side of the jig and adjust as necessary.
I superglue each of the sides of the timber and leave it to dry for
10 minutes to be sure that it cures.
I mark the face side, that's the side where I
checked the angle, I mark a crosshair right over the edges
and it's done.
To use it, I mark crosshairs on the piece I want to drill, I place the custom drill
jig face down and line up crosshairs with crosshairs,
I firmly hold it or clamp it
and drill
leaving a nice perpendicular hole in the timber.
Alternatively, if I had to do holes on the edge of a piece, I can modify my jig
If so, on the face of the jig, I measure out a line from the center of the hole,
I rule it,
and with another piece of MDF, I glue it on as a stop edge
then simply mark a line on the piece that I want to put a hole in, either to meet up with the
crosshair or the edge of the jig, I hold it firmly or clamp it then I drill the hole
and it's done.
This video really reinforces the idea of
"measured twice cut once"
and if it was useful to you, please like and subscribe, if you would
like me to make something else please drop a comment below,
remember guys
Break It Til You Make It!
and I'll see you next time.