Ikea Lack Table Stacking Drill Guide

thingiverse

I wanted to build some sturdy Ikea Lack tables. There are plenty of brackets available, but they all take hours to print, so I decided to design 4 custom brackets that would lift one set of table up. But for the rest, I chose to drill 1/2" holes for dowels and glue them into the table tops. The legs simply drill through, and the protruding part of the dowel holds them in place. The dowels expand with glue so there's no need to drill smaller holes. I used one table as a base to create a solid foundation. That was easy to drill since you could just go through the back. In retrospect, I should have done all the drilling ahead of time. But I'd already assembled the tables in anticipation of printing brackets. Yes, I could have taken them apart, but I didn't want to. Drilling the legs is straightforward since you can use a ruler to find the center (draw an X from corner to opposite corner). But drilling the table tops with the legs is challenging. So I created this drill template which works for both the tops and the legs. The pilot hole is small, so the idea is to get the drill point in there and make a mark, then remove the guide and finish the hole. You'll damage the guide, but it's just a few pennies worth of plastic and you can easily make more. The legs are nominally 50.5mm square, but there's quite a variation, so your results may vary. I decided to make this a customizer, mostly out of habit. This was printed on my 5-year-old Printrbot Plus, which has been modified countless times. It's hard to tell what's original and what's not anymore. The brackets in the finished product picture are these: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2002785 -- I did add two screws to each of the back ones and cracked one. Some glue sort of fixed it, but it looks ugly and is out of sight. However, the others look great and work well.