Good results cutting aluminum

Aug 17, 2007 24 Replies

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

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...

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

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

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