Anyone tried DIY Drillium?

As well as being addicted to bright and shiny Italian things, I also love a nice bit of drillium to perv at

I'm thinking of taking the plunge and drilling my record chainrings :shock: Fortunately, I can scan the chainrings and draw all the drill positions. We have a CNC router at work so I plan to drill a master template to use as a guide. Unfortunately, I can't use the CNC to actually drill the rings as I don't trust it to give a perfect fit on the ring, a fraction of a mil out and its not going to look right.

My plan is to use the master template, fix it to the ring and then use a pillar drill to drill the holes. Take off the template and countersink the holes.

Has anyone else tried doing their own drillium and are there any obvious pitfalls?

Or, some pics of good pervy drillium would be welcome

You may have seen this page already but i'll link to it anyway:http://www.velo-retro.com/peterjohnson.html

I've not done this sort of drillium... I have done a few BCD conversions on chainrings with hand tools, so for me priority number one was to find the dead centre of the chainring... even though it doesn't have a centre.. if you see what I mean?...and work from there with dividers and centre-punch. That's more of a 'one-off' approach I suppose..

torqueless":104765i3 said:

You may have seen this page already but i'll link to it anyway:http://www.velo-retro.com/peterjohnson.html

Click to expand...

:shock: Holy cow - that just looks like everything will bend! I mean it's very pretty and all, but that's taking it way too far...

Thats a lot of drill bits. Pretty pointless if you ask me. Each to their own though.

Just from my engineering experience, if you're making a drilling template then make it out of steel so that the drill bit is less able to wear it away while you're drilling. Ideally you'd put something like the chainring on a rotary table on the drill or mill and click it round, then all the holes will be on exactly the same radius, but not everyone has access to that sort of kit (including me, actually )

BUT, what you could do is make a simple jig. Use the drive-side crank and a BB mounted in a sheet of wood. You drill a hole in the wood between two teeth on the chainring that you can poke a pin into and you've made yourself a simple indexing system. Now clamp that to the drill base, drill a hole in the chainring, pull the pin and move it round one tooth... you see where I'm going...

Lidl have an offer on a power drill and the bits are in offer too - a low tech, low cost option? I don't think i would start on Campy stuff though.

I got a lovely Ofmega drilled chainset recently, and i think i saw a bike with drillium for sale here this week - it was for sale in Brighton i think - a varnished frame over chrome - looked great - if you like that sort of thing!

I would be interested if you give it a try.

Like this on my Dave Russell? Not very adventurous I know but the large ring was done in 1971 with a hand held Black & Decker and a centre-drill. When I re-acquired it a couple of years ago I tidied it up using better equipment - and a lot more experience! I also did the small ring using a pair of dividers to mark the centre line of the ring circumference, a scriber to mark the longitudinal positions of the holes keeping them in the same relative positions to the large ring ones and a centre punch for the final marking. Started with a small drill (1/16 inch approx) and then opened out with a larger and then lightly countersunk them. The front plate of the front mech was done to tidy it up as the previous owner had bodged it up. The brakes were also done in '71 with the same B&D and centre drill using a Mk 1 eyeball and a steady hand. I have a set of SR factory drilled rings which look much neater than this!

Search online for the interresting article `The Drill-Out Craze' by Bill Robertson. If you can't find it, I'll dig it out and post it.

In the meantime - I've just received some new drillium levers (on the right!) to replace some that were just too extreme, but still in use by the top Italian amateur who owned the bike I bought...