A little diversion from railway modelling saw me trying to assemble part of my Dad’s African Queen model boat. He passed it over to me because he didn’t believe the operation could be carried out. In other words it looked difficult and he didn’t fancy trying it. Besides, I’m the one with a pillar drill…
The task is to drill a hole in a little bit of wood that looks like a pyramid with the top cut off. Into this hole goes the base of the mast. Not too bad except that the mast is only a bit smaller than the base. Dad expected to be making a new part once the supplied one split.
Without any real expectation of success I set up the drill and popped a small hole down the centre of the part. My plan, such as it was, revolved around drilling the hole out with ever-larger drill bits until the mast fitted. Hopefully this wouldn’t disturb the wood and I’d get away with it.
All went fine until I hit an unexpected problem. My pillar drill only takes small (under 6mm) bits and the mast was larger than this. Not much larger though.
Anyone who has done a bit of woodwork will have waggled a drill bit in a hole while drilling to get a slightly larger aperture. That’s what I did. It wasn’t pretty and the waggling took time, but amazingly it worked !
Engineers are looking horrified. This is not how you are supposed to do things but I bet some are also thinking, “I’ve done that” or remembering some other bodge.
Anyone out there want to admit to bodges of their own ?
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