2 Attachment(s)
Drilling perpendicular holes where the drill press won't reach.
Not sure if this is the right place to post, but I had a problem, sort of worked it out, and thought I'd post it here to see if it's any help to anyone else...
I need to drill two near perfect holes in the top of an ES style body. this would generally be a job for a drill press. Unfortunately, drill presses have limited reach, and mine has a reach that is about 1/2" too short to drill the holes I need.
In theory you could use a drill guide to make the holes. These are available from many places and seem to run between $20 and $40 US.
Attachment 11714
In practice, my drill guide has been a pain to use. It drills perpendicular holes, but it's easy to get them slightly off center because the bass of the guide is not very stable. To make matters worse, the surface fo an ES body is curved, so I can't put a guide on top of it to drill the holes anyway.
So, I decided to build a stable platform for the drill guide that I could put over the body. I took an old shelf I had lying around, but any flat piece of wood will do. I cut a couple of pieces of 2" thick scrap lumber so that they were perfectly flat on both the top an bottom, and about 3.5" tall. This formed a stable base. I screwed the drill guide down to the platform to maximize stability. I wanted the drill close to one edge of the piece of shelving, so I used a hole saw to drill a 3" hole for the drill bit to go through. you could do this with a jig saw, or drill a smaller hole, but the big hole, and being close to the edge of the shelf, gives a better view of what you are drilling into.
Here's a pic of the whole thing drilling into my test piece of wood.
Attachment 11715
continued next post...
