Gallery, Projects and General > How to's
routing steel pannels
PK:
Thin stock is hard. In my experience you need something like vacuum hold down and low to zero helix angle cutters. Laser cutters (of course) excel in this application.
Best solution I've seen to the fixturing problem was a thing called an Ice Vise.. Just a flat plate that clamped to the table, you spritzed it with water, put your work piece on it then opened some valves which dropped the temperature below zero and froze the part solid. When you are done, flip the valves the other way and it got warm.
PK
sparky961:
I have to agree, laser is the way to go for thin steel. Even engraving/marking on the surface is simple. Plasma is a somewhat-acceptable second choice, though no decent marking there. There's got to be a place in a larger city near you, or an online resource you can tap.
With all the lasers I know of within 30km of me, I should start a job brokerage firm!
PS. The "Ice Vice" sounds cool! Pun very much intended. ;)
efrench:
It may be faster and more efficient to just do it the old way with a jewelers saw and a file. A metal cutting jig saw is another option.
SwarfnStuff:
Just a thought.
Have you considered water jet cutting? Naturally this depends on there being someone nearby that does it but if you supply a CAD drawing the cost may be reasonable.
Then, you perhaps want to do it yourself which is fine too, just need to work out how you can get the finish you want from my reading so far.
John B
PekkaNF:
Many years ago I made a fuse/switch panel to a boat. I used 3 mm aluminium, because any thinner or steel was no go.
I used 22 mm floor grade (extra strong) MDF as a sacrificial board. I drilled the fixing holes (that actually were used to fix it in the boat) and used them and panel printed out of transparency to mark the holes.
Inside the cutouts and over the holes I put thin doublesided tape.
MDF was prepared/clamped and one side had a strip of wood epoxied and milled straight. The strip was needed to index the panel straight before dropping it down. Good luck trying to straighten panel with double sided tape......
I used plenty of screws to clamp down the panel.
I milled the cutouts plenty of trough, but left generous "tabs" on longest sides. Then I screwed down the cutout, with a screw that had a large head, some unscrewed portion that was excactly same diameter that the slot I milled. After the hairy bit I found out that you need two screws on every four side of the square cutout. Phew.
There were some blemishes, but luckily I was working on the back side of the panel, none of them showed up on final work. I left some cutouts with the tabs, because It was not too hard to cut the tabs out and file straight parts.
Needs plenty of clamps to support thin sections between the cutouts. I used plywood.
Round holes cut with camfer bits came out perfectly camfered and clean.
I cleaned up the face of the panel with solvent and abrasive sponge. It came out nice.
Pekka
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