Never throw anything away! Or how I saved $362 on a Lamello Divario Marking Jig!

[luvmytoolz]

Having recently bought a Lamello Zeta P2 at an eye watering price, I was pretty disapointed when I saw the Divario marking jig supplied with the kit was a small flimsy plastic sheet with a fold, just rubbish really, I'm actually surprised they weren't embarrassed putting something so poor in a fairly high end tool kit.

Checking the website I found the one all the videos show, at the gold plated price of $362, for a thin piece of folded sheet metal.

Luckily I never, ever throw anything away unless I'm 1000% sure it is absolutely rubbish and will never be useful in any way, so I remembered I had some spring loaded pins with locking detents I pulled out some server equipment 10 or so years back that I thought would be perfect.

So as seen in the pics I made the first marking jig a really long one as that was the first bit of 6mm polycarb I pulled out of the stack, 380mm, with stopped holes to hold the pin bodies and clearance for the pin itself (which is 6mm diameter). I also used a vee cutter to mark out the alignment markers at the top and bottom, and the centre marking lines inbetween the pins. In one of the pics you can see 2 pins pulled out and 2 just released.

The steel angle is hard disk mounts, which I tapped for M5, and used stainless steel M5 countersunk screws, and then because I really like overengineering wherever possible, also put some M5 T-Nuts on the underside from my smaller CNC machine, so after getting it dead nuts square, this baby has zero wiggle room and will never come apart!

So I'll make a smaller one as well, and then I'll have to make up a lantern chuck for the lathe so I can accurately bevel the ends of all the pins to make them a sharp point.

The last couple pics show the good and the rubbish guide. Also, in the plastic container I have part of a huge stash of spring loaded CPU screws, these are pretty heavy duty so if I was to make a jig out of steel or aluminium sheet these would be perfect.

So the moral of the story is if it's even remotely interesting in any way, don't throw it out!

For those who may be interested, this video shows the Lamello sheetmetal jig in use: