Hi, my name is Dale and welcome back to Metal Tips and Tricks. A friend of mine, Jim Bowen, you're asked, how do you do a bolt circle if you don't want to use your dividing head or your rotary table? And that's really a good question because you know to put up your rotary table, you have to take your vice off, bring up your rotary table, get it lined up before you can drill any holes and then you have to take it off, put your vice back up. So you're talking a good 30, 45 minutes worth of labor, but is there a shortcut? And that's what Jim wants to know and the answer is yes. So let's say we want to do a layout on this and we want to do seven holes and I pick seven because well, it's kind of a lucky number. So let's go with that. Well, what you could do is cover this with dykeum and then go in and scribe a circle all the way around. Very easy to do with a set of hermaphrodite, hermaphrodite, hermaphrodite, hermaphrodite, hermaphrodite calipers. Got to that one. You know, you could set it up, you could also do it from the inside, you could do it from the outside and that's really in a situation of where you don't have a reliable center to go off of. Now another way you can do it, now of course you could make a center for it but again, you're adding more labor. Well, another way to do it is put it on your lathe and just cut a line right where you need it. Very simple. So the next step is we've got one of our base lines taken care of for the marking and then we're just going to do right around that. If you don't have dykeum, that's okay. You can also use a sharpie. Works really good. Now I've already kind of hopefully measured this out. So what I want to do is I'm just going to scratch some lines in. There we go. Now I think well, anybody can do a layout like this and be reasonably close but let's take it to the next level. What we want to do is take out as many variables as possible. We're going to try to put in some mechanical stops to help us. First of all, we're going to have this stop in there and that's going to give us three points. So when we clamp this in, that's going to hold it. I'm going to put in a couple parallels and we're getting really close. Now what we have to do is this block is going to shift around on us. So let's take advantage of knowing that. You're going to bring it in here. Okay, we're just going to kind of get it lined up a little bit. Feel where it's good. Excellent. Let's tighten down that rotation. And now we need to take a stop and put it up against there. And this stop is going to help keep this feed block in alignment. You guys see where I'm going now? So we're going to end up eliminating one of our variables. And that variable is the distance from this outer edge to the center of the hole. We could do it manually, but this is going to just help us. My goal here is to just get set up on the line. So let's line up one of these marks. Let's see how we're doing here for. So there we go, the beginning. Now we're going to drill this all the way through. That means my parallel is of course going to be in the way. That's how easy it is to do a bolt circle without having to set everything up. Now I also know a lot of you guys don't have dividing heads or rotary tables. Here is a great solution for you guys that are a little more on the lazy side and don't want to pull out those extra tools. This is also a great system. Give me some thumbs up, a little button down here in the bottom left hand corner or right hand corner on your guys' side. Also leave me some of your great comments. I want to hear what you guys think about this. And until next time, go out in your shop, build something cool. Thanks.