This job leaves me perplexed; it's from 20 years ago

Find the center of the hole, run a dial indicator along the key to find the angle and do the math.

up next to the punch and screwed them in. They took the punch off and want ed me to cut keyseats into the plate. There were about 12 keys there. Wha t is the best way to pick up these keys that is accurate? An edgefinder is out of the question, because you cannot come in on a tangent since the key s, their angles are all over the place. The only way that I can think of i s to scribe a line around the keys, take the cutter, or better yet a pointe r, and point out the coordinates and program minus cutter radius. A couple of thou out of whack should be OK. It's important that the one side of th e key butts up against the punch in order to keep punch location. Any othe r ideas about how to pick up these keys? The die makers didn't like my wor k much which pissed me off. I picked up using a pointer. They expected ev erything to be within a thou. A tight fitting key, and a tight location. Very tight. By eye.

I thought of doing that and trigging it out, but how to establish a locatio n? And I don't know what you mean by picking up center of the hole. I mus t be missing something here???

********* do you have access to a computer with any kind of cad in it? You can draw the keys simple 4 sides, and give yourself a center of each key picking up using an edge finder at a known horizontal or vertical position.