JMP50 Clone Build, Part 6
The JMP50 build saga continues as I fabricate the turret board from scratch, drilling and mounting nearly 70 wee small turrets.
I’ve drilled and mounted turrets by hand in the past and, well, they weren’t that pretty. This time around I used a laser-guide drill press and full-size paper template that I marked up so that all the turrets would line up. With a guide mounted on the table, all I had to do was slide the Garolite along and drill each hole. This is the next-best-thing to using a drilling template.
I’m very happy with how the holes came out—they’re all lined up in neat rows and look very tidy and professional. One thing I would do differently in the future is to cover both ides of the Garolite with masking tape so it doesn’t show the faint scratch lines you see.
Here’s the finished turret board. I used the same drill press with a turret staking tool in the chuck to swage the turrets. I didn’t take a picture of the process, but it went very quickly—just push the turret into place, put the long end into a small mandrel, and crank down on the drill press. I think the whole process of cutting the Garolite, drilling the holes and swaging the turrets took less than two hours.