I finally started work on getting the sawmill up and running. The angle iron for the track has been sitting here for a month, the carriage a month longert than that. I just need to drill 20 holes in quarter inch steel, and that’s that. Yup.
I got Jeremy to help me move the angle iron and the drill press to the back deck yesterday, then today I laid out all the pieces so I could mark the holes. The first interesting item was discovering that the diagram I have is all in inches. It is also in French, so I had my brain around centimeters, but they didn’t work.
I laid it out, and discover I need to drill 7/16 holes. I don’t think I’ve ever owned a 7/16 bit, so Valerie picked one up for me on one of her twice-daily trips to Keene. One of the sliding bunks(?) (une serre bille en francais) that hold the log dogs was misdrilled with 3/8 holes, too small for the supplied bolts, so I set out to do that first. The result is in the last picture.
So. Did this happen because I was trying to bore out an existing hole, because I used the wrong speed on the drill press, or because the bit I used was softer than the steel I was trying to drill? I have a half inch bit. I think I’ll try making one hole with that all the way through and see what happens.