Pen Blank Drilling Jig

By Trent Kelly

I needed a jig to hold small turning blanks upright for drilling on my drill press.  With a little searching through my scrap bin I came up with all the wood I needed.  I already had a 4' T-Track kit sitting on my shelf, so some pieces of that went in as well.

I started by cutting 4" x 2" and 4 3/4" X 2" pieces of 3/4" plywood.  Then I used a Clamp-it® square to glue them together at a right angle with Titebond™ III glue.  The 4" x 2" piece butts up to the end of the longer piece so that the length of each side is the same from the corner.

I squared off a piece of scrap 3/4" plywood to 8" x 8" for the base.  The plan was to have many options for clamping the base to my drill press.  Then I routed a slot in the base for a piece of t-track.  I cut the length of t-track with a hack saw and glued it in place with Gorilla Glue.  It is important to use a glue for this step that will stick to both metal and wood.  Looking at the jig after the fact, it would be a good idea to make the track shorter than the full length of the slot and make some sort of replaceable piece of wood to slide in and fill the rest of the slot.  As it is with the full length track, the blank will need to be a little longer than the pen requires or I will need to place a small piece of wood under the blank to prevent splintering on bit exit.

A square placed perpendicular to the t-track makes it easy to align and center the corner brace on the base.  With the brace positioned, I traced the corner brace onto the base and glued it in place with more Titebond™ III glue and several clamps.

I found some red oak in my scrap bin that was trimmed off a project in years past.  The piece is two 3/4" thick pieces that were glued together.  I squared off the piece on my table saw, drilled a 1/4" hole for the t-track bolt, drilled slightly more than 1/2 of a hole in the center of the other end with a 3/4" forstner bit, and sanded the corners down to a 45° angle.  The forstner bit hole allows the clamping block to hold square or round blanks.  The sanded corners allow the block to slide in close to the corner brace for holding small blanks.

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