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A Laser Gizmo That Helps You Drill Straight

The BullseyeBore makes it easy to see when you're off-angle

By Rain Noe - August 21, 2015

in Hand Tools

Learning to drill a hole perfectly perpendicular to your surface is a crucial DIY skill. If you're drilling downwards into a horizontal surface in front of you, it's easy enough to see if you're leaning the drill along the X-axis, but a little trickier to tell if you're off in the Y-axis. Now a company called Cerwin Tools has developed a little laser gizmo they reckon will help you get it perfect.

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Called the BullseyeBore, it's a small plastic disc with laser optics inside. You chuck it into your drill along with your bit, and then it projects easy-to-see concentric circles. By gauging the gap between the circles, one can thus tell when you're perpendicular or not:

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I'd never use one myself, but I think the device is a neat idea. And it might make a good gift to encourage the uncoordinated to start working on their drilling skills.

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Dimitrios Grigoriou

9 years ago

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I had the same idea a couple of years ago. The problem is that there is only one center of rotation so all circles (or ellipses) are always bound to be co-centric and never intersect each-other. I don't know how they projected the static inner circle on the video demo. I couldn't find anything about self adjustment in the patent text either. It is still working for the depth although there are much simpler ways of takling that. The result with the circles is that they are perfect circles when perpendicular but become ellipses when tilted. The problem is that depending on how you tilt your head circles can look like ellipses and vice versa so it was not much of an aid.

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- Dimitrios Grigoriou
  
  Dimitrios Grigoriou
  
  9 years ago
  
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  Actually now that I re-examine my prototype I see that the circles did intersect if the laser beams were not parallel but the tilt required to make it noticeable was too much so I didn't pursue that idea further. So yes in principle it works.
  
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Jason Pokines

9 years ago

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At first I was worried that it was based on being level with the earth, but I see now it's perpendicular to the surface you're drilling regardless of orientation. I think it's genius, and I'm disappointed I didn't think of it first.

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