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Make Your Own Transfer Screws
Transfer Screws and Transfer
Punches are hugely useful around the shop. I own commeically made transfer
screws in a number of small sizes, but it's so easy to make larger ones
that I don't bother buying expensive premade transfer screws for the larger sizes.
Recently, I needed to make
a cover plate for my IH mill to mount an oil pump and generally make it
look nicer. To do that, I needed to put 4 holes in an aluminum plate that
would line up properly with the holes in the column casting:

How to locate
those 4 holes on my aluminum plate?
I could fuss around
with calipers trying to get the hole locations right, but what a pain.
Transfer screws make it easy. So let's make a set of M8 transfer screws
for this job!

Start with 4
M8 bolts and nuts....

I Loctite the
nuts in place so they won't come loose...

Set your lathe
compound over for cutting a 60 degree angle. Feed each pass with the compound,
and set the depth of cut with the other dial. As you get close, ease of
the depth of cut!

Here's one finished!

Pretty soon
you have a set...

Put them in
the 4 holes, hold the plate up, give it a tap, and you've located where
to drill...

Like my funky
Kant-Twist table clamp? Handy as heck. In this case, I avoided dragging
out the big vise by clamping atop my little one...

It's just that
easy and just that fast...

Still need to
countersink the mounting bolts and make a set of holes for the pump!
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