I've been making infill planes from scratch lately and need help with a particular problem. Take a look at the steel rivets with brass sleeves fixing the front bun and the rear tote and infill to the inside of the plane in this photo.
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To place these sleeved rivets, I clamped the plane to my drill press table and, using a drill bit that matched the diameter of the rivet plus sleeve, I drilled all the way through from one side of the plane to the other.
Then I counter-bored the hole on each side, eye-balling it in an effort to make it not too big, not too small, in hopes that when I peened and filed the sleeved rivets, they would fill in the counter-bore perfectly.
But as the small gap around the rivet and sleeve through the bun shows, eye-balling it doesn't get the job done.
Can anyone suggest a jig or a technique that will enable me to drill a perfectly sized counter-bore repeatedly? It's very frustrating to get this far into a project like this only to mar it, and I'd greatly appreciate some input.
My drill press, FYI, is a Craftsman with runout and an imprecise, screw-type gizmo limiting quill travel. Some months back I bought new bearings in hopes that they would solve the runout problem, but I haven't had time to take the machine apart and install them. But it's not the runout that's the problem, in any case. It's the fact that every time I counter-bore the holes for my sleeved rivets, I end up with a different opening. What's the solution?