Friday 19 December 2014

Drill press Sled

My kitchen table just after I set up my new but cheap drill press.


I've been building a drill press sled that will bolt to my drill press bed so I can try to use it a little like a milling machine to cut the bridge slots a little deeper to allow for the piezo pickup that will sit under the bridge saddle. I'll need to source some down cut milling bits at around 2mm or so.
My Makita router is way to big for some of the more delicate work and money is very rare around here so we make do .
In the picture you can see the Aldi cheap Livingstone childrens electric guitar I'm swapping to be left handed.




Outside the front of my flat cutting and routing the drill press bed using my little coffee table as a set of saw horses lol

To be honest I'm a complete noob at sketchup and lacked the patience to find out how you make a corner rounded so I built it in 3ds Max (during the day I pretend to be  3d artist) and then imported it into sketchup.



Well the cutting and routing outside on a wobbly coffee table gave me the results you'd expect lol
accuracy suffered a bit and I'm waiting on the glue to set on the assembly so it will be a while until I posts pics of the final result.


Slowly widening the slots to get it to slide, it's a very tight at the moment.



I'm starting to wonder if the Tenor Uke will be too large to make the distance from the drill bit to the back of the drill to route the slot mmmmmmmmmmm  I'll measure it after I've finished, the last thing we need is flying MDF in my small kitchen hahaha


Regardless the sled will come in handy I have no doubt at least the wood wont be as nasty on the bodies of instruments than the steel base.


Bolted onto the metal adjustable plate


From underneath.


Sliding the top side to side revels that the routed lines may not be exactly parallel, it slides to the left with no trouble and displays a tiny amount of movement, to the right is becomes very stiff with no play whatsoever.

I'll probably make another one down the road but this will do for now and will do the job it was designed for. 

MDF was never my choice for the timber but the ply was way beyond my means this time.










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