Shelf Pin Jig - not quite Festool LR32!

My workshop cabinets are going to need a lot of drawers and shelves, and I'm poor at getting anything straight/square/parallel/anything not resembling chaotic. I need something to make drilling as foolproof as possible.

I spent a fair amount of time on the internets looking at jigs, ranging from the very expensive Fe$tool LR32 system, to some very clever and complex homemade jigs.

Simplest homemade flavour I found was using a router and template guide. Drill a series of big holes in a template, and split the template down the middle. The two sides of the template are then used for the front and back series of shelf/drawer pin holes. This way, even if your measurements vary from hole to hole vary, the two halves are mirror images, so drawers should always be parallel, even if vertical spacing is slightly variable.

However, drilling and spacing meant another potential source for my accuracy gremlin to play havoc. I needed an excuse to use my new dado set, so I decided on another cunning idea I found - to use the dado set as you would to make a box joint jig which would serve as a template guide. I have a Fe$tool guide rail and TSO rail square, so if I indexed off that, things should remain straight and square.

I didn't realise how difficult it would be to find a 5mm router boring bit. The bits that fit industrial boring machines seem to have a 10mm shank. I couldn't find anything with a ¼ or ½ inch shank, so I ended up getting the Festool 491066 5mm dowel drill. It has an 8mm shank, and fortunately I already have an adaptor for my ½ inch collet:

Attachment 467127

$50-odd for that little beast, but man does it bore well. You pay for Festool, but the stuff does what it says on the box.

I spent a fair amount of time setting up the dado and box-joint jig, making sure that the dados fit the router template guide snugly enough so that there was no play, but not so tight as to make getting in and out easily. I ended up about a 10th of a mm out with the spacing - 31.9mm instead of 32 :oo: :;, but that's about the limit of my capabilities. It does add up - after 10 holes, you're a mm out, 20 and it's 2mm etc. But good enough for garage stuff I hope.

Attachment 467128

Swordfish:

Attachment 467125

Template guide:

Attachment 467126

As a temporary test, I'm indexing off the back of the rail with a little 3d-printed rail clamp and a piece of MDF that fits into one of the Dado's. Once I've fiddled around a bit and decided on the final version, I'll probably 3D-print the whole thing.

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Lights, camera, ACTION!
First row:

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2nd row:

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Did some drawing and checking, and it all seems to line up ok, so I'm pretty pleased with the results so far.
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Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Things I'm playing around with in my tiny little head:
-redo in hardwood once I've settled on the design? Not sure how well the ply will hold up with lots of use.
-accurately boring the first hole: I think I'll make a little jig-dado-sized block of wood with a locating pin through it; mark the first hole, drill a small 2 or 3mm pilot, and use the pin block to locate the jig.
-Possibly getting rid of the track completely and making the jig index off the side of the cabinet. Means a bit of work and requires accuracy which I'm not good at...

It's probably too late as you have gone down another path.
But I've been using the Kreg shelf pin jig for quite a while. It's easy, and you can use it in situ and the system allows you to drill holes for as long as you want ad they always algin.
A word of warning. They have both the 1/4" and the 5mm drill bit. We only use 5mm here. I think the jig is the same, and just the drill bit is different.

My jig is a sheet of melamine with pre drilled holes. 1800 x 445mm 16mm ABS Pre Drilled Melamine Shelving | Bunnings Warehouse Cut down so I am only using one row of holes which I have drilled right through.
Yes the holes might get over sized with use, but it works when you need to retro drill holes in cupboards.

I did look at the various ready-made jigs available, and also the peg-board/pre-drilled melamine-type options, but they tended to fall into expensive/holes wear out/use a drill etc. The torquata jig from timbecon looked pretty good.

Advantage of the router is it's very fast once set up, and you can get very accurate depth control, particularly when you're shelving from both sides.

The drawer runners I have have an odd spacing so the fixed jogs won't give me a 2nd row of holes in the right place - I'd need to step up to the adjustable jigs like veritas or woodpeckers... with corresponding costs.

My old work had one of these before we got a CNC Hettich online catalogue
Simple, effective and never wears out. You do have to buy special drill bits but they're carbide tipped and last for ages before needing a sharpen

I played around with the jig a bit more: 3D-printed some re-designed indexing bits - one to locate the first pin hole, and the other to locate the jig on the track.

It works, but I'm not happy with the overall accuracy. There's a tiny bit of side-to-side movement in my standard sawstop mitre gauge, plus little bits of movement here and there, all of which add up to mm inconsistencies across a long run of holes. Not sure how much difference this will make in the end, but it's irritating nevertheless.

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I had another crack at this. Needed something easier and more accurate to build my under-bench cabinets.

I ditched the Festool rail idea. Too many parts, too many sources of error.

Instead, I went with the shelf-pin method. This is pretty simply to make - I used a shelf pin from the big green shed, some red-tongue flooring offcuts, and some 4mm MDF. The flooring is a bit chunky for the task, but hopefully it'll be reasonably stable.

Shelf pin epoxied to the router base:

Attachment 487463

Matched to the rail - I spent a bit of time marking this up as accurately as I could with 32mm gaps, and drilled it with a fence and the Festool shelf-pin router bit in the drill press. Then slowly crept up on cutting through the centre of the holes on the table saw.
It's not absolutely critical to be micrometer-accurate as you just shift the rail along to drill subsequent vertical lines of holes, so each horizontal row will be exactly in line as long as you don't move the stop locating the rail on the bottom of the part you're drilling.

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Simple MDF stops to get the correct distance from the edge of the cabinet to the vertical rows so they match up with LR32 hardware, like the King Drawer slides I'm using:

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Add it all comes together to make accurate LR32 holes very quickly:

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The pencil lines are where the vertical rows of holes should fall, and the square confirms the two sets of holes are exactly in line (there's a bit of parallax error in the photo - they're exact):

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All-in-all, I consider it a success. Simple to set up, accurate, and very quick.