It occurred to me that if I just welded anotherpiece of angle to the head of a regular old ‘joint jigger’ I’d end up with a pretty handylittle fully adjustable notching tool. The only difference was that the notcher needed to be adjustablerather than fixed in place.At the time we had several dozens of fixtures in the shop for various applications and onewe seldom used that I built one day in an attempt to simplify jigging parts up for tacking.That fixture, which nobody liked, was made from two pieces of one-inch angle iron witha little double acting hinge in the middle. The notcher had to be accurate to at least one-quarter degree.This might sound like a big list of features but in fact these were almost the samerequirements we fulfilled on a daily basis when we built temporary welding fixtures tohold parts in position. The notcher had to be easy to use otherwise coping with a grinder would be abetter method of doing the work.9. The notcher had to be easy and cheap to make.8. For light work the notcher needed to be bench mounted in several positions.7. Notch large members or heavy structures so the notcher had to be portable and beable to clamp onto a partially finished assembly.6. Cut double compound notches where three members intersect and one or all threeof the tubes are out of plane.5. Cut compound notches where the tubes meet ‘out of plane’.4. Cut notches from 90 degrees to almost flat angles, as tight as just a few degrees.3. Cut notches in round, square or rectangular tubing as well as in angles andchannel sections.2.

They say that necessity is themother of invention and in this case the old adage was entirely true.What we needed was a fixture that would at least perform the following functions:1. The Chopper Builders Handbook – Volume IIThe Chopper Builders Handbook ‘Notch-O-Matic’ Tube NotcherThe DesignBack in the seventies and early eighties when I was still building rods, bikes anddragsters on the side while trying to make a living doing general industrial fabrication wehad a need to develop a tube notcher that used regular bi-metal hole saw bits.The original ‘Joint-Jigger’ and clones that were on the market just didn’t do the job forthe types of structures and chassis rails we were building.

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