Just bought my first lens in about 5 years. And what a beast it is, the shutter fairly dwarfs a Copal 3. It just arrived today, and while opening the box I remembered that I dismantled my crappy drill press for that studio stand mock-up, and now I have no quick way to bore a lensboard.I could make some new fixture for the mill, but I’ve always wanted to do this sort of operation on a lathe. Besides, my mill isn’t rigid enough for a boring head and I don’t have a rotary table yet. I do have quite the collection of hole saws, but shutter bore sizes rarely match the imperial sizes I have on hand.
Turns out I could still use a hole saw anyway. Since I don’t have a 4-jaw chuck yet, I just used the largest size hole saw that would safely fit into my lathe’s 3-jaw chuck, first mounting a block of wood to it with a few long machine screws. To hold the lens board in place, I then added 4 tabs around the perimeter. Partially boring the hole saw into the back side of the piece of wood helped locate and strengthen the connection. The whole sick mess just barely clears the lathe bed. A few hashmarks ticked off at the corner of each diagonal with a compass made it pretty quick work to center the board on axis.