Mini-Lathe Beginners

Transfer Punches

Transfer punches are another one of those immeasurably useful things that nobody tells you about when you start in metalwork as a hobby. It was quite some time before I realised that I could be a set of problem solving transfer punches - until then I just stuggled along, not knowing the solution existed. Such is often the way in this hobby.

One buys a set of transfer punches. A set can be cheap or expensive. The cheap ones worked for me. A cheap set will be roughly made, whilst an expensive set of transfer punches will be made from ground steel.

A useful set of transfer punches is a set of 25. These range from 1mm to 13mm in 0.5mm steps.

A transfer punch is used to copy the pattern of through holes in one part onto another part. For example, if a part contains 2 through holes of 5mm diameter, and I wish to bolt the part to another part, I would clamp the first part to the second, and use my 5mm transfer punch to push through the holes in the first part and mark up the second part with the required screw hole positions.

Note that sometimes, especially with less expensive sets of transfer punches, you will find a certain amount of "play" when wiggling the transfer punch in the through hole. My prefered practise is to wiggle the punch around in the hole as much as possible in all directions. This scribes a small disk on the target part. You can then remove the first part and punch out the centres of the scribed disks using another punch.