Locate Drilled Holes Perfectly!

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. One of the basic maker skills, and I don't care whether you're working plastics, metals, or wood, you need to be able to drill holes accurately and get them placed exactly where they need to be. Fortunately, there's a lot of little cool tools that aren't that expensive that really take the guesswork out of that process. Stay tuned and I'll walk you through some of my favorites. I love working around the shop, but I'll tell you what's really irritating. When you drill a hole, when you're trying to mount something, whether it's a hinge or a tool to a workbench, and then you find out afterwards that the holes weren't aligned right, now you got to grind out the hole or put a new top on or make a mess of things and hope that you can hide it well. Well, those days are past with the help of some of these tools. I'm going to walk you through these very quickly. Some of them you may be familiar with, and others you're going to say, why didn't I think of that a long time ago and where do I get them? And you can check on all of these in the description below. It'll just tell you model numbers and what to look for, search terms to find them from your favorite retailer or online. So here we go. Let's look right across here. This is one of my favorite tools right here. This is an adjustable automatic center punch. Now you can see this thing has had a lot of use, and I don't remember the manufacturer on this one, but they're available by different people. I believe this might be a general tool, but you can look around. Here's some of the features on this. Well, let me tell you what it does to begin with. It allows you to put a punch mark on plastic, metals, and wood by putting the point where you want it, putting this up, and then pushing the top. And listen what happens when I do. You hear that click, and then what you end up with is a dimple that's left right there, that which not only physically marks where the screw or the drill bit or whatever needs to hit, but it also gives you a starting point. Now what's going on in the tool? Well, this is spring loaded, it's weighted, you have a hardened steel tip, which by the way is replaceable, I've never had to replace one, but by screwing that left or right, the more I back it out, the softer the impact will be, and the higher impact I need, I'm going to bring it all the way here, and that's high pressure, more pressure. So if you're doing very soft metal, like let's say aluminum, certain grades of aluminum or brass, you can put it low pressure and it's going to put a little dimple. If you need something that's harder, you're drilling, putting in a mark on the edge of pipe or something like that, or some real hardwood, then adjust it up, put this point to wherever you have determined it needs to be, press down perpendicular, it'll fire, trip the internal hammer, and dimple it. Gotta have one, I don't care, I'm a woodworker, and this is used more in metal a lot of times, love this tool, consider getting one if you don't have one already. Now here's some other things. These are self-centering drill bits. A major manufacturer of these for many years was VIX, V-I-X, and many people call these VIX bits, but that's kind of like calling facial tissue Kleenex. VIX is a manufacturer name, and they're a good tool, and this may be an actual VIX bit. One of the advantages of the VIXs is by using that set screw, I can adjust this up and down to determine how far the bit's going to come out the bottom for pre-drilling. Now, why do you need all that to just pre-drill? Well, notice that each of these have a chamfer around the nose, and the bit comes out centered. Doesn't matter, see here, this one, again, both have ejection ports, there's your chamfered side. As you drill in, that comes out the outside. This particular one has to be the quick change type of quarter-inch drive. This is for the standard drill chuck, and here's yet another one with a little bit different size, a little bit smaller. But the idea being that if you've got a device like a hinge or something like this, and you want it precisely there, that has a chamfer, this has a chamfer. When you put it there and drill it in, the resulting hole is going to be dead center where it's needed, and when you tighten the screw, it's not going to drag the piece of hardware out of misalignment. Okay, so that's my second set of cool tools. Along the same area, if you're not doing a drilling, but you want to start a pilot hole using kind of like an awl type of feature, you can see that this is spring-loaded, and by tapping on this, that's going to drive this in. Again, it's chamfered, it matches this, so if I put this here and drop that there and then tap it right there, it's going to end up with a center hole right below it that it makes it easy to drive screws in with less twist-off and perfect alignment and placement to keep the piece of hardware as you desire in the position you want it. That brings us to this last set of new additions here. These are center point transfer punches. If you notice this whole set, which by the way, this cost about $25 at Home Depot. The brand name is Starks. It's an overseas tool set. I couldn't find one easily here locally, but if you notice that tip right there, you have the body of the punch here plus a centered apex right in the middle that when you drive this through a known set hole, you're ended up with a mark right where it would be needed. Sometimes you can get off, like let's suppose that we're taking this little saw, which by the way, I'll do a review of this cordless compound miter saw in another video, but let's suppose that I was taking this saw and I was going to mount it on a surface. No, I'm not going to put up my roll-around bench, but just for example here, these types of tools come with mounting holes. This is usually for a wood screw. This is for a through bolt. Let's suppose on my workbench, I was going to put some through bolts. I've selected this one already. It would drop right through the hole right here. I'll use this wood block as a mallet. You would tap that. I'm going to go right to the back, do the same thing right here, go right on around, and we got one left. Let's return that back home and we'll go ahead and take that off of there. Now you can see right here, right there, all four of those are perfectly where I would need to drill them and the resulting hole will be centered right below the fixed holes of my tool base because you want the hole to be right the first time. I'm certainly not going to re-drill the tool base and I don't want sloppy egg-shaped holes or tear out underneath when I'm having to re-drill and so forth. Well, these are great little tools. They don't cost a lot and boy, do they jump up your accuracy and professional results. If you have a tool or device like that you'd like to share with your fellow viewers, do so in the comments below and we'll help get the word out. If you found this video to be helpful, won't you please like it and better yet, subscribe to our channel and when you do, ring the bell so you get notified immediately approximately every Friday when we publish a new episode about tool uses in the shop, the garden, truck accessories, living in the kitchen with some great recipes there. Until the next time, this is Dirk Farmer Jay from DirkFarmerJay.com