Centre drilling

To centre the hole in the handle, if you do not have a special edge-finder tool, you can get quite good results using a piece of plasticine and a pin. With the centre drill in the drill chuck, squeeze the plasticine onto it and push the pin into the plasticine so that it points downwards on an angle.

Start up the spindle motor and touch the end of the pin gently with the edge of a rule or similar until it is spinning without wobbling at its tip. This should then be indicating the centre axis of the spindle. Bring the spindle down (or table up) until the pin tip is very close to the fixed jaw of your machine vice. You should be able to line up the pin tip and the inner face of the fixed jaw by eye to within 0.15mm. We can call this location the

‘zero point’.

It is important that, when winding the table over to find the right position, you come on to the zero point travelling in the direction that you will wind the table out to when moving to the centre of the dibble handle. This eliminates backlash error. Good lighting is important for this too.

Once the pin tip is positioned as well as you can judge it, set the table cross handle dial to zero. Then wind it a further 10mm so that it will be directly over the centre of the 20mm handle area of the dibble. Measure that part first and wind over half of the actual diameter if it is different to the 20mm on the drawing. This diameter does not have to be too accurate, so it is OK if it is not dead on.