Then it's off to the drill press to drill the holes you need. And now you have marks where you need to drill. You then position the workpiece that requires the holes, give it a quick strike with a hammer. They're screwed into the holes you need to transfer. I had my solution! I placed an order with McMaster Carr for the punch I needed, and I had it in my hands the next day. However they have points in them instead of the hex that one would expect from a set screw. It's a small tool that stores threaded screws that look almost like set screws. He showed me a 'threaded hole transfer punch'. And if you haven't guessed by the title of this post, that was about 25 years ago. But I still wanted to keep the clearance holes as tight as practical.Ī 3D model of the T-nut that was pressed into Plywoodīut I remembered watching an old tool maker when I was a young engineer fresh out of college. So the hole placement was made to more of a carpentry accuracy than an aerospace tolerance. Sure I could measure out the holes, but the threaded holes were t-nuts pressed into plywood, and the holes for the t-nuts were measured using a tape measure. Recently I was working on a project that required I transfer the location of four threaded holes to a piece of aluminum so clearance holes could be drilled. Sometimes, a lesson learned from long ago comes to pass.

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