pic: 3647 Frame

[AllenGregoryIV]

Originally Posted by Mk.32

The debate on whatever doing a hole pattern in every rail is worth it or not is one that my team is still kinda spilt on. A lot of people have told me that I could have "saved a lot of time" if i just drilled the holes I "needed". I however believe that having a standardized bolt pattern to be a life saver and make general construction a breeze. And allows for fast changes to the design, plus doing them on the mill makes sure they are all square and dead on, and with our machine abilities it wasn't that much time.

I'm a believer in the standardized bolt pattern and we did them with hand drawn lines and a cheap drill press. One of my students did 1700 holes over a 3 day weekend. I tried to get her help but she said it would be faster if she drilled everyone and just had other team members mark them for her. We hand cut the gussets on a band saw and drilled them with printed templates.

Some of the bars can be seen in this post.

We ended up needing the holes very often for design changes. We added a separate section to our ball elevator in about an hour because we already had all the holes ready. I'd really like to see more teams use this construction method.

Are you using all 1/8" or is most of that 1/16"? We did all 1/16" and only had a few poles bend due to ramming into the bridges but otherwise it worked out perfectly.