pic: 3647 Frame

[IanW]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

The problem with a jig for this is tolerance stackup. If you're drilling 50 holes 0.5" apart you'll be an entire hole off by the end if your jig if consistently 0.010" off. If you're marking every hole by hand, you can be off by 0.010" on each hole and it won't matter much because that's 0.010" off the true dimension, not the distance to the last hole.

If you want a really long setup, you could make a similar jig and use a previously drilled bar as an indexing plate. As long as you use the same bar as your indexing plate, all the copies of it would be pretty similar.

My team ran in to this exact problem last year and arrived at the exact same solution. We had a small CNC mill that we used to make a template and then had students use it on a drill press. We didn't just use the mill for the entire operation because it is much easier to train a freshman to use a drill press than it is to train them to use the mill, which only 3 people knew how to use to begin with.