Making eyelet or turret board drill templates.

In this post I will show how I create a drill template for a 5F2-A eyelet or turret board using Corel Draw and an existing board as the starter.

First photograph and measure the board you want to template.

This board is approximately 7 1/4" (7.25)  X 2 5/8" (2.625). Next open up Corel Draw, I'm using version 12 here but any version would work. If your board is longer you can change the orientation of the page from portrait to landscape to make it fit. I usually change the defaults for the drawing to inches and setup rulers and grid lines to assist with the layout. Here I've drawn in the outline of the board using the rectangle tool.

Next I'll import the picture of the board and send it to the back so it's behind the rectangle I drew. Next I scale the image to fit the size of the rectangle. I've changed the colour of the rectangle to make it appear a little better in the screenshot.

Now I will drag down some guidelines from the ruler bars and align them on the straight rows of eyelets. Since the picture is slightly skewed the eyelets may not line up perfectly with the guidelines. So I use the guidelines to center the vector circles.  This shot shows the almost completed vector work. It really only takes a few minutes if you are comfortable with the drawing package.

The solid red circles are for the wire pass-through holes. Next I will delete background image and change all the line and fill colours to black so it prints nicer on my laser printer.

Here's a shot of the template ready to go to the printer.

This should work with any vector drawing program as as long as it will allow you to import a bitmap image as the guide.  You could also use images from layout drawings kicking around on the net as long as you have a rough idea of the size of board you are trying to template.