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Good results cutting aluminum

I may give it a try. I'd be surprised to find another blade fitting on the mount in my cutoff saw; that'd be a miracle of standardization that I have come not to expect. But maybe tooling is better than other areas of industry.

Yes, I'm all about safety equipment. Safety earmuffs and goggles are on before I even approach a tool that loud. (For less noisy tools, I do omit the earmuffs, but I don't even use a drill without the goggles. I not only want to protect my own eyes, but I want to be sure I'm demonstrating good habits to my boys when they start working with tools.)

No kidding. I run it in the basement guest room, but I sweep up afterwards. While we're on the topic, I was surprised to find that aluminum has an odor when it's cut. Should I be wearing a breath mask too? My intuition tells me that it's not a problem; the dust doesn't seem to hang in the air, but instead spews itself neatly over the table and floor. But I've been wrong before.

I do still have plenty of time to return it, so maybe I'll make an effort to find such a blade first. I guess fundamentally, a blade and a grinding wheel are both just discs with a hole in the middle (and this saw accepts wheels with two different arbor sizes -- 5/8" and 7/8").

So, would you guess that any 6" blade with a 5/8" or 7/8" arbor diameter, and rated at 9000 RPM or higher, should be safe to use?

A brief search suggests that this may be hard to find; 6.5" seems more common in circular blades, and most of them have a 1/2" arbor. I did find this diamond segmented blade:

It's the right diameter and arbor size, but they suggest it for cutting concrete, block, and brick. What would it do with aluminum?

Best,

- Joe

Reply to
Joe Strout
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The trick is that you use a center punch to mark the hole position and guide the drill. This works great in aluminum.

If you want a drill press, don't get the "Dremel tool drill press"; it's total crap. Get a small bench-top drill press. Take a look at Grizzly G7942,

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mini drill press for $85. Get the drill press vise ($10.95) to go with it. For about $125, if you have the room, you can get a low-end but full size drill press. This is enough for soft aluminum; if you're drilling steel, you need a heavier duty drill press.

The next step up is an X-Y table for a drill press. Then you can put holes in the right place consistently. Grizzly Industrial used to have a low-precision one for about $100, but they seem to have discontinued it. We had one of those at Team Overbot, on a low-end drill press. Very convenient. We had to make many mounting brackets, and used 1/8" x 1" steel bar stock, a bender, and a drill press for most of them.

Beyond that, you're into machining for the sake of machining. I know three people who have full-sized milling machines at home, but they don't use them enough to justify owning the beasts.

There's also "emachineshop.com". Download their program, design the part, pick the material, get an estimate on line, put in a credit card number, select number of copies desired, and start the job. Their free CAD program is quite impressive, and it understands their manufacturing capabilities. It won't let you submit a design they can't make, and it knows when you're doing something dumb, like specifying a square inside corner on a milled part.

John Nagle

Reply to
John Nagle

Missed this comment before: when working with power tools, I have no idea what the word "cowardice" means. My father did (well, at least he had a concept of "safe enough"), and he had nine fingers for the last few decades of his life due to a disagreement with a table saw.

"Ah, I just thought of a way to make that process safer" is a phrase I'm very familiar with, and one I try to think of ways to employ

*before* I'm holding what's left of my hand since what I last did wasn't quite safe enough. So far, so good...
Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

Any power drill with high speed steel (or better) bits is perfectly capable of drilling steel.

Reply to
Joe Pfeiffer

Excellent points. Thanks for making them.

This is part of what bugs me about combat robotics. To play in that sport, not only do you have to work with some pretty serious power tools (cutting steel and so on), but you're also purposely building a very destructive weapon. Unlike most power tools, it is *designed* to be destructive, and moreover wasn't designed by a professional, experienced engineer. And how many participants have a thick Lexan arena to test it in? I suspect most of them are just tested in the garage or driveway, following procedures that their builders hope are safe enough.

I want my son to grow up knowing how to build and fix things, and excited about science and engineering. But I also want him to grow up with all of his fingers and senses...

Best,

- Joe

Reply to
Joe Strout

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