Here I'm using my Starrett punch, one of my favorite tools, to start the holes I need to drill so my bit doesn't walk when I get the drill press going. I'm striking the punch with a little Estwing ball-peen hammer that I like for metal work. I'm not 100% sure if a ball-peen hammer is the right thing to strike a punch with but it's the most appropriate thing I have.
Granted, my little Estwing is not a super fancy hammer like a Stiletto titanium TiBOne TBM14RMC, but it does alright when I need to get a little striking done.
Now I'm drilling the radii out with my drill press that is from the Jurassic Period. I never expecially liked this drill press. And this drill press is ancient. And I bought it new at Home Depot. Maybe . . . yeah. Ok, let's just say my drill press is older than some people who are adults and leave it at that. I don't want to think about that anymore.
This is the outline of the back bracket completely cut out with the angle grinder and drill press. It looks like paper . . . but it's actually steel. Well, paper glued onto steel. I used this photograph imported into Adobe Illustrator to do the next phase of the project which was to drill all the holes for the RAM balls.
Luckily and somewhat bizarrely, on the item listing in Amazon for these RAM balls, they included this nice engineering diagram that I used to make a layout template to show me where to drill the holes for these RAM balls.
This is the vectorized version of the drawing in Amazon. I had not yet sized it properly. That was very easy to do though since the exact dimensions were given on the diagram.
This is vectorized and cleaned up a little.
Now this is exactly to size, you can see in the upper right, it's 2" x 1.69".
Now I'm laying out all the possible ball mounting positions. There are a lot of positions for mounting balls. You can mount the balls from the top, from the bottom, and even from different angles. The possibilities for mounting balls are endless.
One supposes technically speaking, the possibilities for mounting balls are not endless. "Is that a shoulder?" I think I count fifteen different positons for mounting balls.
You can see from the printout of this second layer of the template, the printed size corresponds exactly to the size of the physical object.