John Coloccia
09-20-2010, 11:04 AM
I just post this because I've met enough people in the last month that don't know how to do this that I thought I'd give my simple technique. To drill a bunch of evenly spaced holes in something, I setup a large framing square on my drill press, lined up so that when I push my workpiece into the corner it is lined up on the last hole I want to drill. Then I simply take a piece of wood the thickness of the spacing that I want, and I slice it into little shims. Then you just need to drill, place a shim to move it over, drill, place another shim, etc.
What's nice is if you have a particular hole spacing you use often, like the holes on an acoustic guitar bridge, you just make the spacers once and you're all set.
Another hint is to make up one half width spacer for patterns where you have an even number of holes. Then you can be sure the work is centered by using the half width spacer in the center of your stack, and line things up from there. Same can be done with odd numbered holes by simply using the the correct number of spacers.
This always seemed like such an obvious way to do it for me, but I'm surprised how many struggle trying to line everything up by hand and always being off a little here and there. I hope this helps someone.
edit: Of course, you don't HAVE to do evenly spaced holes. You can use whatever combination of shims you'd like to get whatever pattern of holes you'd like to get.
What's nice is if you have a particular hole spacing you use often, like the holes on an acoustic guitar bridge, you just make the spacers once and you're all set.
Another hint is to make up one half width spacer for patterns where you have an even number of holes. Then you can be sure the work is centered by using the half width spacer in the center of your stack, and line things up from there. Same can be done with odd numbered holes by simply using the the correct number of spacers.
This always seemed like such an obvious way to do it for me, but I'm surprised how many struggle trying to line everything up by hand and always being off a little here and there. I hope this helps someone.
edit: Of course, you don't HAVE to do evenly spaced holes. You can use whatever combination of shims you'd like to get whatever pattern of holes you'd like to get.