Time to drill holes......
I've talked about doing this for 2 years and finally the time came to put up or shut up. To be honest, I had to call in reinforcements to make it through the process.
Here are the much talked about drill jigs that Derek Landstrom drew up on AutoCAD The white painted ones are Version 1; which after getting cut out with the laser we realized a couple of the holes were off. So we came up with Version 2 (Green and red in subsequent pictures,) that had all the corrections needed... but we forgot to add a couple holes and burned the root fitting holes at 3/4" instead of 7/8". Luckly, between Version 1 and 2 we had everything correct at least once. Version 3 is being drawn up now.
If you look at the drill jig, you'll notice two 3/8" roll pins on the far left and right of the jig; these locate the jig to the proper height on the blank. Next you'll see several rectangle windows with a pointer; these alight the holes to the correct running dimension on the blank. So all you have to do is pull the tape measure once and mark the respective length on the spar, then slide the drill jig until the pointer lines up with the pencil mark. Clamp everything in place and drill some holes.
Talking advice from David Johnson, Georgia Mountain boy himself... I mic'd the brand new forstner bits and they were all oversize to varying degree. So I chucked them in the neighbor's lathe to trued them up, which was surprisingly easy because it was only cutting tip that was out of spec. On the same note... the bushings were all undersized. After drilling test holes before and after truing the bits, the bushings would press into the holes with a little resistance. Perfect.
The man himself, Derek Landstrom, trying out the jigs.
I told him if he F'd up we'd have some words...
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