Cutting Disks

How many do you need to make? If it is not too many, I would try making a single sided die and use it spinning in a drill press. It could have a .025 drill so it drills the hole first and then cuts the disk in one operation. Think of a toothless hole saw. I have used something like this for cutting rubber disks. I did not need the hole in the center.

Dan

That's what I was thinking. When I worked in a printing company they had a hole drill that would melt through a 1/2" stack of paper with ease--a sharpened thin tube spinning in a small hand press--had a cutout on the side to eject the paper disks. Should be easy to make one for a drill press. I believe it was sharpened on the inside of the tube since they were after clean holes, for clean disks sharpen from the outside.

Hmm. I'd be making batches of 10 or 20. That would certainly do if I weren't going to try to farm the work out to my 12 year old, but I wouldn't want let him close to the power machinery.

Well, you know your kid's capabilities/responsibility level best. I won't go into what I was into at his age, lol. Parents are more careful these days.

#1 son may have been OK, but #2 son gets anxious when there's a need for honest caution. Then he locks up and stops thinking.

If you're not afraid of power tools at all then you won't think about the hazards, and you shouldn't use them. If you're so afraid of power tools that the hazards make you stop thinking -- you shouldn't use them.

Hopefully he'll grow out of this.

Only because you think you, as a parent, are more careful than your parents were. That would be doubtful and I would believe they thought the same thing of their parents

It's only the view on the other side of the coin, only.

You will have no idea what your kids are really doing until they tell you the stories, a few decades from now, over a few beers.

The other day, our shop got an order for some viton rings for gaskets. Joe the Real Machinist made a cutter, with a cross-section like this:

+------------------------+ | | | ___ ____________ ___ | \| |/ \| |/

He laid a sheet of viton on the anvil of the hand-pumped hydraulic press; the anvil was just a piece of plate. He put the viton sheet on the anvil, laid that cutter on top of the viton, and just pressed it until he heard the viton part. It wasn't very quick, but it held about 0.003" or better.

I guess this would be comparable to the "paper punch" style, but the anvil was flat - think "circle punch" or "arch punch."

Hope This Helps! Rich

How about a laser engraver/cutter? Tim, I'm guessing you don't happen to ha= ve one in your garage, but any fair sized community has one for hire. I liv= e in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin and there's a town of about 5,000 a h= alf hour's drive from me with one.

Heck, if you could find just the laser itself, you could maybe rig up a lit= tle laser "milling machine" with the laser mounted in an overhead spindle. = The material could be held with a simple vacuum chuck so it would be clear = to do both the circumference and the hole with two 360 degree rotations of = the spindle. Release the vacuum, move the material, make another cut.=20

Ha, the Instructables site had plans for something using a laser taken from= a DVD drive a while ago. No idea if that could actually cut your materials= or not.

Ken

Not something you want your 12 year old (or you, assuming you're smarter than a 12 year old) playing with unless you have a LOT of enclosure/protection/failsafes built in. There are a lot of really stupid ideas on the web, and putting a class IV laser in anything that does not totally prevent people (eyeballs, particularly) from interacting with the beam and reflections is certainly one of them. Short of proper laser safety goggles for the wavelength in question, a closed lab, and the wit to use both it's foolish and criminal (in the literal sense, at least in the US.) In most cases the law is unlikely to come into play until after an unfortunate incident has taken place, though, so it need not interfere with your sensible violation of it - if you are indeed sensible.

That is not to say you couldn't build a reasonable CNC laser cutter that _does_ require guards in place to light the beam. I've just seen a few too many "make a burning laser pointer" sites recently, and the mind-numbing stupidity of these is numbing my mind (I used to work with N2, CO2 and Nd:YAG lasers, and I still have both eyes.) That might be a fun project, but it's hardly getting Tim's little plane wheels made in a timely manner.

On which subject - you might be able, given the materials and sizes, to make a "toothless hole saw-like punch" (with center pin for the center hole) as was discussed and vetoed for the drill press and this particular 12 year old that would be adequately functional in a hand application. Put a knob or crank on the back end (or a shank to go in a brace and bit which has both knob and crank), and perhaps a hole in a block of something (guide block, or crude drill press approximation) to guide it and hold it perpendicular as it's twirled and pushed by hand to make the cuts.

After you have made the tool and chucked in the drill press, the amount of time to make 20 ought to about one minute. I would just do them yourself and figure out something else for you son to do.

Dan

This looks like a cheap solution:

Roger Shoaf

Part 2:

For the center hole it depends on how close you needed to be. If you got a set of dividers and a center punch, you could scribe the circles, drill the holes and then punch the gaskets by eye. If you needed more precision then you could make a little fixture with a drill guide bushing.

Roger Shoaf

Or their siblings rat on them years after the fact. I had the honor of watching my brother (who originally heard the story from my mother) maneuver my 68 year old uncle into admitting to his mother that he had been out dynamite fishing on the Clackamas river when he was in his early teens. Both her astonishment and his squirming were a joy to behold.

Yeah my uncles came out with the story that my goodie-goodie father took apart a farmers wagon and re-assembled it on top of his barn roof, for a Halloween joke, way back!

I was awed by it. He was embarrassed.