Shelf-pin drilling jig

The jig picks the pitch, not you

Unlike a run of balusters or wainscoting panels, shelf-pin spacing is not something to solve for — a jig drills at a fixed pitch, and the two that matter are the 32mm system nearly every commercial cabinet line uses and a plainer 1" pitch some shop-built jigs use instead. Whichever one the jig drills is the one every hole in the run will be.

What is still a real question is where that fixed pitch lands on a specific panel: how many holes fit between a sensible top and bottom setback, and where the first and last one actually sit once the count is not a round number.

How many holes, and where they start

A 30" panel with 3" kept clear top and bottom leaves 24" of usable run. At the 32mm pitch that is a different hole count than at 1", and neither count divides the usable run evenly — the jig's own reference hole is what the first mark actually keys off, not the panel's raw height.

Getting the count right matters more than it looks: one hole short of what the run allows is a shelf position given up for nothing, and running past the bottom setback puts a hole where a stretcher or a kicker is hiding.

The two systems do not mix

A door and a drawer front on the same cabinet, drilled at two different pitches, put their shelf pins at different heights for no reason a customer can see — a European hinge line at 32mm and a shop-built jig at 1" will never land on the same mark twice, even starting from the same setback. Pick one system for a piece and drill every panel in it on the same jig.

The same reasoning is why the count for a given panel height is worth checking rather than assuming: 30" at 32mm and 30" at 1" do not land on the same number of holes, so a cut list written for one system is wrong for the other even when every other dimension matches.

What this page does not tell you

• —The setbacks here — 3" top and bottom — are a starting point, not a rule. A wider bottom setback is common where a kicker or a stretcher sits behind the panel; check what is actually there before drilling.
• —A self-centering jig only centres across the panel's thickness. Getting the same hole heights on the left and right ends of a cabinet still depends on registering the jig off the same reference edge every time.
• —These are through-holes for a pin shelf, not the blind holes a cam-and-dowel jig drills for a fixed shelf — different jig, same arithmetic for where the marks fall.