Moving the bed instead of the drill.
Humm…
Anyone have 2 printers they can scrap (I mean hack) into an X Y moving bed? I would think the carriage belt & stepping motor would provide enough torque to move low mass objects like printed circuit boards and the like.
Or…
I haven’t done this yet, but I always though if I were going to drill out a PC, that I would cut a pre drilled board down the holes, attach that to a moving bed and slid that against a fence with a protruding notch sized so as to catch the edge of the holes of the pre drilled board. So much for the X direction, for the Y you would have to move the fence in 1/10 inch increments. But most boards are laid out w/the IC aligned from left to right (you know what I mean). So it should be easy to drill multiple rows of 1/10 inch holes using this technique before moving the fence.

I was expecting more. My definition of precise is at least +-0.005″. Stacking business cards is only useful for small holes and grids, and will vary hole spacing by pressure applied and type of paper.

Taylor said:
“And contrary to what he implied, moving the bed is standard. Most CNC’s and manual mills operate with an x-y movable table and a z axis head. Though knee mills allow the table to move up and down a bit too.”

Guess I was thinking woodworking when I was thinking “fixed bed”. Well… I guess I have seen 1 woodworking CNC where the wood was “shuttled” back and forth leaving the head to do Z and Y (or X depending on where you are standing:)).

Drill skate will limit your accuracy more than anything else, especially for small holes. If you center punch the holes before drilling, though, you can do it with your eyes closed.

@tom that’s not very strudy, it’s thin acrylic only meant to mark points to drill consistently.

What you could do is use a drawer guide, they aren’t too expensive often but run smoothly in only one dimension, then attach it to the underside of some sort of plate and you can manually CNC, if you forgive the expression.