Let’s say you’re spending your weekend on a home hardware project. You know the kind of thing - dremel in hand, you’re ready to cut holes in panels or drill positions for screwholes to assemble your latest hardware project.

You know that what you should do is use some kind of CAD package - or at the very least, do a good drawing with ruler and finelines - to make sure you get all the holes in the right places and everything fits together…

But you want to use that Dremel, dammit!

I have a solution for the incredibly lazy engineer, who at least has access to a photocopier1 or a scanner/printer.

Just put your components - screwholes, mounting lugs ’n all - on your copier, hit copy (1 to 1 scale of course), and hey-presto - instant templates to cut out and glue, that you can use to line up that drill or jigsaw.2

Scanning your components...
...makes for easy cutting templates

  1. Does anyone still call them photocopiers? ↩︎

  2. Does this qualify as a lifehack? ↩︎