[Boatanchors] Drilling Holes Questions - WOW THANKS GUYS

[whitebear1122 at comcast.net]

Wow, many thanks for all the great advice!  I'm starting to feel more confident in doing a better mechanical job on this 9 tube superhet receiver!  

The many BA list and private responses are giving me a lot of new information that I didn't know.

I didn't know what an automatic punch was before.  I looked at the links provided here and some YouTube videos, and I'm sold on the precision it brings.  My Stanley punch never gives me that kind of precision, with every whack of the hammer I only feel like I'm in the neighborhood, but never directly over the mark.  So the automatic punch is the first thing I'm buying.  I'm surprised at how slim they are, allowing a more precise hole locate.  

The next thing I'm learning from the comments is to start out drilling very small pilot holes first, and then work my way up to the right size hole.  My typical method is to whack the center punch, then come in with the drill bit at the final size.  So the dimple is already off center, then I find that centering a larger bit on the dimple is imprecise, a guess at best, so the hole is now off center even more.  So the lesson I'm getting is to first use the automatic punch for a precision hole, then drill a tiny pilot hole, then follow up with a somewhat larger bit and "upsize" to the final hole size. So each upsizing isn't so dramatic, and is only cutting a little bit of metal each time.  One of the videos recommended here demonstrated 'upsizing'.  I get it.  

Several people recommended 'center drill bits' and I've taken a look at those.  I see the benefit, and will buy a set of those also.  I will also look into the Uni-bits, and a hand reamer.

One thing mentioned here was to make sure the drill bit shank was all the way in the chuck.  Now that I reflect on it, I can remember instances where I didn't do that, and watched the bit wander or skitter.  

The Metal Magic videos are good and I watched several this morning.  

One thing that I see here is that I need to secure my chassis down when hand drilling.  I can think back on episodes where the chassis moved a bit when I came down with the drill.  

Something else that came from Metal Magic was using a more precise marker pen for laying out the holes either on paper or on the chassis.  The pencil that I use is not precise.  While I'm not building something for the NASA Moon Launch, it looks that everything I've been doing adds a little bit of error, and it all adds up to big error.  

Several good comments about marking the chassis using a marking paint, blue painters tape, or paper layout.  

My thanks to you for sharing all this great advice!  With each recommendation, I could think back on my last two radio projects and see where the recommendation would have made it better.  73 Scott WA9WFA