Pipe hawk handle drilling fixture

[B.Finnigan]

I have been working on a pipe hawk and I will be using the mouse hawk handles. After some searching I was not able to find any extra curly maple handles that came pre-drilled. So I ordered a couple handles and set out to fiqure out how to drill them out accurately. After squeezing my brain for a couple days I came up with a fixture to attach onto my 9x20 metal lathe. I have drilled out round handles before just by putting them into the chuck throat and using the tailstock to hold the 12" bit.

That would not work with the mouse hawk handles so I designed and built this fixture and it worked great. Like all machining, the tooling up took far longer then the actual drilling did. There are too many pictures to post but I put up a quickie tutorial on my MSN page along with the description of the process. It should work with the regular hawk handles also. The last two inches were done with hand drill since I had a very accurate and tight pilot hole to guide it. The torque was too much for the drill bit holder on the lathe to hang onto after ten inches.

Pictures.

[nc_cooter]

Cudos on a very ingenious solution!

[B.Finnigan]

Thanks! Next week I will make a slightly larger one for regular sized hawk handles. Aside from the 12" drill bit ($35) it is a very cheap fixture to make. I forwarded the pics and description of the fixture to Rade Hawkins so he may be offering pre-drilled mouse hawk handles in the future.