Built for accuracy and longevity

I made this while working at The Factory NYC, for a project consisting of curved walls for the client. The walls were designed to connect using coffin locks, but the jig on hand for drilling the keyholes wasn't up to the job.

After talking it through with a coworker about what a better guide would actually need to do, the problems to solve came together: work out the coffin lock's placement and exactly where its keyhole needed to land on the face. The guide had to lock into the void where the coffin lock installs in the side wall while positioning a drill guide sleeve directly over the correct keyhole location.

The structure of the guide was built from plywood — but plywood alone wasn't strong enough to guide a drill bit accurately; the hole would bore out and lose accuracy after just a few uses. The fix was a 1/2" steel tubing sleeve set into the plywood, so the bit rides along steel instead of wearing through wood, cutting every hole true. The sleeve was pre-drilled for set screws, seated with expanding industrial glue, and locked in with the set screws to make it permanent.

The guide worked as intended, and more are now being built for the shop so multiple crews can run this same operation on different jobs at the same time.