Line Boring Machine

[Chris Stormer]

Hi Guys,

I'm making a chair back that uses 5/8 dowels. I want to get some kind of boring machine that I can setup to bore around 11 holes at once. I see most of the machine mention they are 32mm standard. Does this mean that the distance between the holes cannot be adjusted?

[Walter Plummer]

It has been awhile since I used one but yes, straight line 32mm apart or take out bits to widen spaces in 32mm increments.

[Martin Wasner]

I've never seen one that was adjustable.

[Erik Loza]

Correct: Every line boring machine I have ever seen was specifically for the 32mm system. That's the industry standard for shelf pins and such.

Erik

[peter gagliardi]

What your looking for is specific to the chair and furniture industry. Older machines made by Bell, Challoner, Rye, and a few others i can't think of the names right now.
Look for chair/furniture factory auctions

[Jamie Buxton]

For a much lower cost, you can make a line-boring template in your shop to use with a plunge router. It is just a piece of plywood with a line of holes in it. The holes are sized for a standard template guide. One face of the template gets placed against one of the workpieces, and the other face of the template gets placed against the other workpiece. Done this way, the hole-to-hole spacing does not have to be precise; the holes in the workpieces will line up. And, of course, you can make the hole-to-hole spacings anything your chair wants.

[Glenn de Souza]

For a much lower cost, you can make a line-boring template in your shop to use with a plunge router. It is just a piece of plywood with a line of holes in it. The holes are sized for a standard template guide. One face of the template gets placed against one of the workpieces, and the other face of the template gets placed against the other workpiece. Done this way, the hole-to-hole spacing does not have to be precise; the holes in the workpieces will line up. And, of course, you can make the hole-to-hole spacings anything your chair wants.

+1 on this recommendation. A plunge router will bore very clean holes, even in melamine. I recommend a jig plan from a book called Router Magic by Bill Hylton. Here is a link to the jig. It may seem a little fussy to build it to the author's level of precision with the incremental baseplate, but you'll be glad you did over and over. Also, while he recommends 1/4 holes, I built mine with 5mm holes in mind which I bore with a 5mm straight bit.

There seems to be a formatting problem with the article, but you'll get the idea. Get the book, you'll find a lot of good jigs in it.

http://www.woodworkingarchive.biz/router-magic-higs/shelf-support-template.html

[Frank Pratt]

Are you building 1 chair back or 100 chair backs? Unless it's a LOT of chairs, it doesn't seem like it would be worth the trouble to get a complex, expensive machine like that.

[Charles B Wilson]

A line boring machine is not what you want as already mentioned. A vertical boring machine is the machine to do the job you describe. I would look for a used "sicotte" or maybe a "cemco".
Keep in mind a machine with an 11 hole capability will be a large industrial machine requiring experience to set up and run, and don't forget tooling ..............


CW