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Rocker
30th December 2003, 08:39 AM
To drill the axle hole in a toy wheel, it is essential to use a drill press to ensure that the hole is perpendicular to the plane of the wheel. However, it is not easy to hold the wheel safely while you are drilling it, especially with smaller-diameter wheels. Toy making books recommend cutting a right-angle notch in a board and lining the jaws of the notch with rubber or sandpaper to hold the wheel. I found this dangerous and rather ineffective with 25 mm wheels, so I made the wheel holding jig in the attached picture.
The jig is held against a lockable pivoting fence equipped with an adjustable stop on my drill press table. Once the fence and its stop have been set in their correct positions, wheels can be drilled repeatably, without the need to find and mark the axle centre.

Rocker
30th December 2003, 08:45 AM
This is the adjustable fence stop. Its locking device is a threaded rod screwed into a tapped hole.

Rocker
30th December 2003, 08:47 AM
Another pic of the fence stop shows the small wooden pad that sits in a square recess to prevent the threaded rod from marring the fence.

Caliban
11th February 2004, 09:18 PM
Excellent work (once more) Rocker. But why not simply use your lathe? Put the wheel in the chuck and put a jacobs chuck in the tailstock to hold a drill bit and Bob's your mother's brother!
cheers
Jim
PS I don't have a lathe so I might just copy your idea.

Rocker
11th February 2004, 09:57 PM
Hovo,
Like you, I don't own a lathe. My efforts at turning on other people's lathes have been remarkably unsuccessful, so I try to work around this gap in my equipment.

Since my original posting, I have acquired a FasTTrak stop, which runs in a piece of sail track attached to the top of my drill-press's fence; so the wooden stop shown in this thread has become redundant.

Rocker

Caliban
12th February 2004, 08:35 PM
David
Good point.
Just as an aside, what timber is your bench top made from in these pictures? It looks to me like finger jointed, laminated hardwood, the kind used for housing construction.
cheers
inquisitively yours
Jim

Rocker
12th February 2004, 10:06 PM
Hovo,

My bench top is made out of two 12" x 72" slabs of finger-jointed laminated rock maple, with a 2" gap between them. I made the bench nine years ago, when I lived in the US, and brought it with me when I moved back to Australia. The rock maple slabs, each with two rows of 3/4" holes pre-drilled, are available over there for people who want to make their own workbenches.

I don't know whether one could get offcuts of roof beams over here that would be suitable for the purpose. I suspect, though, that they would be outrageously expensive. In the US, however, there are huge resources of fine timbers like maple, cherry and walnut, which are therefore relatively cheap.

Rocker